Analysis of ‘The Exterminating Angel’

The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador) is a 1962 Mexican surrealist film written and directed by Luis Buñuel. It stars Silvia Pinal, who also starred in Buñuel’s Viridiana; other actors in the cast include Augusto Benedico, Claudio Brook, Lucy Gallardo, Xavier Loyá, and Enrique Rambal.

The Exterminating Angel was on The New York Times 2004 list of “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.” It was also made into an opera in 2016. The film received the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. At the 1963 Bodil Awards, it won the award for Best Non-European Film.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here is a link to the film with English subtitles.

Since this story is about a group of wealthy bourgeois who, after a night at the opera, go to the lavish home of Edmundo (Rambal) and Lucia Nóbile (Gallardo) for a dinner party, only to find themselves inexplicably unable to leave–it reminds me of the predicament in Sartre‘s 1944 play, No Exit, in which three characters are also unable to leave a room…which is literally Hell. It’s so obvious a comparison to make that I can’t avoid mentioning it, too.

Accordingly, all the bourgeois in The Exterminating Angel will experience their own version of “Hell is other people,” to be condemned to be seen and judged from the perspective of all the others, for as long as they’re trapped in that Hell of a house.

Ironically, the Hell of the Nóbiles’ home is on “Providence Street” (Calle de la Providencia), which is the first of several paradoxes in the film. The last of these, incidentally, is a Catholic Church in which all the clergy and churchgoers (including those bourgeois who have only just been freed from the Nóbiles’ house) are again not allowed to leave…the House of the Lord has been made a Hell.

The very title of the film–inspired from something in the Bible, but also, according to Buñuel, from a Spanish cult, the apostolics of 1828, and a group of Mormons–is a paradox on the heaven/hell theme.

Yet another paradox is what is confining the people inside. Not only is the barrier invisible, nor is it felt. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a barrier in the physical sense at all–it seems to be purely psychological; the guests simply won’t allow themselves to leave. Nothing is stopping them, but that nothing is everything.

This inability to leave is not universal, though: in fact, it’s the servants of the Nóbiles who not only leave at the beginning of the film, but leave urgently, as if they have some kind of clairvoyance about the impending trap that their employers are to be caught in. The only employee to stay, trapped with his bosses and their guests, is Julio (Brook), the majordomo; he is clearly a case of the exception who proves the rule, for he shows a near-bootlicking loyalty to his employers, not only by staying, but also by expressing his condemnation for the staff who leave.

The staff’s suddenly leaving the house, right when their employers are receiving a large number of guests for a dinner party, can be seen as symbolic of a revolutionary act, for in doing so, the insubordinate workers are demonstrating a truth that we leftists have known for a long time: the bourgeois need us; we don’t need them. Revolution is a dinner party, after all…as long as the workers are absent.

Julio thinks his coworkers are being traitors to their bosses, but it is Julio who is being the traitor…to his fellow workers. This currying favor with the bourgeoisie, far too common among pro-capitalist workers, is what thwarts our revolutionary potential.

Some odd repetitions occur during the film, especially towards the beginning. When Lucas (played by Pancho Córdova), the doorman and first to leave the house, isn’t available to take the guests’ coats, Edmundo tells them to go upstairs, where someone will take them. With their entrance, this going upstairs happens twice.

Another repetition occurs in the toast Edmundo makes to Silvia (played by Rosa Elena Durgel), an opera singer who performed that night just before the dinner party in his home. We see him give this toast twice; after the second toast, however, he frowns because no one is listening to him. They prefer to chat with each other.

Yet another repetition is in the greeting of Cristián Ugalde (played by Luis Beristáin) and Leandro Gomez (played by José Baviera). This one occurs three times: first, they meet as strangers, second, they greet each other with the warmest of friendliness; and the third time, they acknowledge each other coldly.

Finally, at the climax of the film, Leticia (Pinal) offers, as a solution to their inability to heave the house, the idea of everyone repeating what he or she did shortly before the realization that no one could leave, soon after the end of the playing of the Paradisi piano sonata by Blanca (played by Patricia de Morelos). The guests’ point-for-point repetition of what they did frees them.

Now, what do these repetitions mean? I believe they can be symbolically associated with Freud‘s notion of “the compulsion to repeat” traumatizing experiences, an illogical act that goes “beyond the pleasure principle,” and which in turn is associated with the death drive, which involves acts of aggression against the self and others as seen among the guests throughout the middle of the film, as they’re all going mad with despair at their inability to leave, and taking their frustrations out on each other.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly traumatizing about not having a doorman to take your guests’ coats in the Nóbiles’ foyer. Nor is giving a toast no one’s listening to a traumatic experience, or even two men addressing each other with icy hostility. But perhaps the point should be made in relation to Buñuel’s wish to satirize the bourgeoisie.

Edmundo loses face among his guests without a doorman to take their coats, and without any listeners to his second toast. What is a minor problem for most people is a kind of narcissistic injury to the proud capitalist, with whom Buñuel would not want us to sympathize. The same goes for Cristián’s and Leandro’s third and abrasive meeting, for the bourgeois can be as antagonistic to each other as they are to the proletariat, in their incessant attempts to outdo each other.

Leticia’s suggestion to have everyone repeat his or her actions to free them all from their confinement is a perfect example of repetition compulsion as an attempt to master and therefore overcome the traumatizing experience. The earlier repetitions, in establishing this idea as a theme in the film, are thus symbolic of repetition compulsion by their association with this climactic moment.

Leticia herself is a fascinating character, and not just for her beauty. She’s nicknamed “the Valkyrie” for her perceived savageness, and yet also for her virginity. Early in the film, we see an example of this savageness when she throws a glass at a window, shattering it. Yet her idea to free everyone through the repetitions make her the guests’ saviour.

This means that Leticia is both good and bad in the film. Consider Pinal’s characters in two other Buñuel films, the title role of Viridiana (1961), the nun who is so protective of her ever-endangered chastity; and her role as the breast-baring Devil in his 1965 short film, Simon of the Desert (which also had Brook playing the film’s title role). In the first film, Pinal plays the saintly thesis; in the third, she plays the sluttish negation; and in this second film, she’s the sublation of the two opposing roles.

Speaking of Hegelian dialectical opposites, yet another heaven/hell paradox can be found in Blanca’s performance mentioned above of the piano sonata by Pietro Domenico Paradies, or “Paradisi,” as he’s called in the film. This ‘paradise’ performance happens shortly before the guests’ realization of their ‘infernal’ entrapment in the house.

The idea that they can’t leave is only subtly introduced. It seems at first that the guests simply aren’t inclined to leave yet, for one reason or another. Blanca, for example, though too tired to keep playing the piano and wishing to go home, won’t go out of the room because she’s been sidetracked by a conversation and has forgotten to get her shawl. This kind of subtlety is part of what reinforces the idea that nothing is really detaining the guests but themselves.

Of course, it won’t be long before they find themselves getting more and more uncomfortable with having to stay. A few, including Lucia! are hoping to have illicit sexual encounters with their lovers, but finding the crowd of guests all around them to be a nuisance. Others are getting uncomfortable in their suits, taking off their coats and ties, which looks scandalous to Lucia.

They all have to sleep on the floor in the salon together, rather than enjoy the luxury of beds. The next morning, Julio has no food to serve breakfast to the guests, because the suppliers haven’t delivered any; so Lucia has him serve leftovers.

Such inconveniences as these are meant to help the pampered bourgeoisie to understand what it’s like to endure the way the working class must. A similar deprivation was experienced in Buñuel’s film of ten years later, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, when the wealthy protagonists’ many attempts to eat dinner together are interrupted, leaving them all hungrier and hungrier.

By the next evening, everyone is beginning to lose his or her patience over this unending captivity. With no more clean water, they start using a closet for a toilet. Here we see the irony of staying in a luxurious home, yet living no better than those in the Third World. Bourgeois heaven has become hell…with all those other people.

Everyone is on edge, one’s normal sense of social graciousness degenerating into bluntness and aggression. Raúl (played by Tito Junco) starts blaming Edmundo for having invited everyone to his home, only to be trapped in it. Indeed, as I observed in my analysis of Wozzeck, it is the stresses of being poor and unable to pull oneself out of the mire, rather than some supposed social ‘inferiority,’ that is what makes one behave improperly, and we can see the proof of this observation in how these bourgeois are increasingly losing their sense of composure because of their ongoing plight.

In fact, one of their older guests, Sergio Russell (played by Antonio Bravo), has died. He earlier expressed a disliking for jokes and pranks when one of the staff serving food at the dinner table fell and dropped his tray all over the floor, getting laughs from everyone else. Lucia thus decided not to present a surprise involving a bear and three sheep out of a wish not to annoy him.

What’s the significance of these animals in the movie? Buñuel insisted that there was no intended symbolic meaning attached to them, saying instead that he got the idea from a party in New York he’d attended, in which the hostess brought in a bear and two sheep. He insisted that the use of the bear and sheep was arbitrary, just to include “some sort of disturbing image.”

Now, this may all be true, and it probably is. After all, surrealism is all about producing illogical, disturbing images as an expression of the non-rational workings of the unconscious mind. But we should emphasize this surrealist notion of expressing unconscious meaning. Buñuel’s conscious reasons for including the bear and sheep, as well as Pinal’s blindfolding of one of the sheep, may just be arbitrary ones, but his unconscious, surrealist reasons are freely open to interpretation. Buñuel may have dismissed many critics’ interpretations–i.e., the bear representing the USSR creeping in on the capitalist nations, and the sheep representing Christianity–as nonsense; psychoanalysts, however, may dismiss his dismissing as mere examples of denial and resistance.

Since Buñuel wanted to leave his film open to interpretation, his reasons for denying the validity of such critics’ interpretations as the examples given above can be seen also as a wish not to allow those interpretations to ossify and be deemed ‘the correct’ ones. I would agree that they shouldn’t be seen as the only interpretations to make, yet I wouldn’t say they’re wrong or invalid, either.

That the bear could, though of course not necessarily, represent Soviet Russia is so easy to see that it needs no further comment. Since the number of sheep (lambs, actually) are specifically three, and they are killed and eaten by the guests in a kind of crude Communion, it is again easy to associate them with Christianity; and the blindfolding of one of them can represent blind faith in that religion, something easily seen in many among the bourgeoisie. These, of course, don’t have to be the ‘correct’ interpretations, but they’re perfectly legitimate ones, in spite of Buñuel’s objections to them.

The guests cannot go outside; nor can anyone outside come in the house. The invisible barrier between the two groups of people can represent that of social class and therefore the impossibility of social mobility. There’s also Roger Ebert‘s interpretation that the barrier symbolizes the rigidity of the society of Francoist Spain. The symbolism of this rigidity is especially apparent at the end of the film, when the people are trapped in the church, while outside, soldiers are firing their rifles at the outside crowd of people, keeping anyone from entering the church. This is rather like the cherubim with their flaming sword to stop Adam and Eve from re-entering the Garden of Eden to get to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24)…only this Eden, like the Nóbiles’ house, is another hellish heaven, a church of Satan, if you will, from which there’s no exit, where hope is to be abandoned.

The barrier can also represent other aspects of Francoist Spain. There were all the leftists who lost in the Spanish Civil War and were kept in concentration camps. Buñuel turning the tables on the bourgeois dinner guests, them representing the Spanish ruling class, and trapping them in the Nóbiles’ house, is thus a kind of wish-fulfillment. Finally, Buñuel, being inimical to the Spanish fascists, had been living in exile from his home country for many years, like those people outside who can’t enter Edmundo’s and Lucia’s house.

Some of the guests are getting ill, physically and mentally, and Dr. Carlos Conde (Benedico) has no medicine to give them. How symbolic this is of the lack of adequate health care in Third World countries (Cuba excepted). Edmundo, however, has a stash of opiates, which he normally reserves for the naughty pleasures of himself and certain friends of his, but now he’s offering them to his guests to mitigate their suffering. How representative this is of how the poor often have to resort to drug use as a quick and easy way to soothe their pain!

…and here, we see the bourgeoisie reduced to having to resort to such extremes.

One night, Ana Maynar (played by Nadia Haro Oliva) dreams of a disembodied hand crawling about the room. Sweating from a fever and terrified at the sight, she tries to stab it with a knife after it tries to strangle her. This is one moment in the film that has caused some critics to call The Exterminating Angel a horror film. Later, other guests will have bad dreams.

Buñuel had used the image of a severed hand before. He wanted to use it in an aborted film project called The Beast with Five Fingers, a film that ended up being done in 1946 by Robert Florey. He originally used the image in a scene in Un Chien Andalou, in which a mannishly-dressed woman is using a phallic cane to poke at a severed hand (as Ana does with the knife to stab the hand)–symbolic of castration, as I mentioned in my analysis of that short film.

In the scene in The Exterminating Angel, Ana, the woman dreaming about the hand, has earlier mentioned her experience of having been on a train that suffered a derailment. That hand moves across the room in a manner that may remind her of the moving train. The length and hardness of the train could also be seen as symbolically phallic, just as the severed hand, symbolic of castration, can have phallic associations.

The derailment of the train, ‘cutting it off,’ as it were, from the tracks, and thus making it impotent and of no use, can also be sen as a symbolic castration, which in turn strengthens the train’s association with the severed hand. The hand choking her is threatening her life, just as the derailment was life-threatening.

Note that castration is symbolic of Lacan‘s notion of lack, which gives rise to desire, the desire of the Other, a desire to be what the Other desires, and to be given recognition by the Other. Such feelings bring us back to what I said at the beginning of this analysis, of how this film is comparable to No Exit, and how “Hell is other people,” because we can’t escape the judgement of those others whom we want to want us, and whom we want to give us recognition.

The lack that gives rise to desire is also the lack that the bourgeois guests are experiencing, a lack normally reserved for the poor: no food, no water, no escape from their trap. Because of this manque à avoir, the guests are coming apart emotionally, and lashing out at each other. During their sleep, an elderly man (Alberto Roc?, played by Enrique García Alvarez) even tries to take advantage of a sleeping woman or two. When the bourgeoisie lack what the proletariat have always lacked, the former prove themselves no better, no more refined, than the latter.

The guests reach such a bestial point that Raúl, always blaming their predicament on Edmundo, says that their only way out of it is to kill their host. Edmundo, always reacting to Raúl’s verbal abuse with a gracious, patient turning of the other cheek, is thus being made out as a Christ figure: his death will save them, it seems. Edmundo even agrees to shoot himself with a pistol.

This is when Leticia brings up her suggestion to have everyone repeat what he or she said or did just after the piano performance. The success of her idea, as over Edmundo’s redemptive death, thus demonstrates in symbolic form Buñuel’s rejection of the soteriology of Christ’s crucifixion.

Finally, the guests can leave. Similarly, those outside can go in. In fact, the staff by now have returned, too.

Now that their ordeal is over, most of the guests come together again to attend a Te Deum service at a church. But as I already mentioned, they will soon find themselves unable to leave. Once again, religion won’t help them any more than it could symbolically back in the Nóbiles’ house (i.e., when eating the three sheep, or killing Christ-like Edmundo). In fact, the film ends with a flock of sheep ominously entering the church.

How fitting it is to see an animal often used to symbolize passive, mindless obedience enter a place where people are trapped behind an imaginary, invisible barrier of their own making.