The Exterminating Angel

Reading Henry Green’s second novel, Party Going (1939) to the place where a group of moneyed boobs is gathered at a train station beset by thick fog. They are bound for the South of France, but the trains won’t move before the fog lifts. Stationing servants to guard their unchecked luggage, the group adjourn to a hotel overlooking the station. Soon, however, the crowd of stranded travelers outside, who don’t have the money to check in to the hotel, grows restless: 

'Robert, what on earth are they doing to the doors?' 'Oh that? They are putting up steel shutters over the main entrance so they told me when I came in.’...'But, my dear, they aren't going to shut us up in this awful place, surely? What do they want to put shutters up for and steel ones?' 'It's the fog, I believe. Last time there was bad fog and a lot of people were stuck here they made a rush for this place I believe to get something to eat. Good Lord! it doesn't make you nervous, does it?' The management had shut the steel doors down because when once before another fog had come as thick as this hundreds and hundreds of the crowd, unable to get home by train or bus, had pushed into this hotel and quietly clamoured for rooms, beds, meals, and more and more had pressed quietly, peaceably in until, although they had been most well behaved, by weight of numbers they had smashed everything, furniture, lounges, reception offices, the two bars, doors. Fifty-two had been injured and compensated and one of them was a little Tommy Tucker, now in a school for cripples, only fourteen years of age, and to be supported all his life at the railway company's expense by order of a High Court Judge. 'It's terrifying,' Julia said, 'I didn't know there were so many people in the world.'(1) 

A group of people effectively trapped in a hotel for an indefinite period is not without its metaphorical potential. It reminded me of Luis Buñuel’s exploration of a similar – but great deal more unusual – situation in his film The Exterminating Angel. While the characters in Henry Green’s novel are literally trapped inside the hotel, in Buñuel’s film there are no physical impediments to stop the characters from leaving. They simply find that they cannot. As Buñuel explained, “It's the story of a group of friends who have dinner together after seeing a play, but when they go into the living room after dinner, they find that for some inexplicable reason they can't leave.” What better movie plot for people who’ve gone through months of pandemic self-isolation? 

Buñuel is the only major film artist who managed to make masterpieces almost fifty years apart – Un chien Andalou (1929) and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). He is also perhaps the one who made the greatest number of stinkers – films that failed on a number of levels. Think of two films he made back-to-back, both literary adaptations: Abismos de Pasión, based on Wuthering Heights, and Robinson Crusoe. Neither film even begins to evoke the novels that inspired them (if “inspired” is the word for it). Of Buñuel’s nineteen Mexican films, only three still hold up. I have written elsewhere about Él, which has suffered the fate of gross overpraise, but I have also devoted space on this blog to Los Olvidados and Nazarin, two quite different but considerably better films from his Mexican period. 

One of the best qualities of Buñuel’s autobiography My Last Sigh is his avoidance, even abhorrence, of cant. He hated the influence of film theory, which he attributed to French snobbery, and took a practical view of his own work, his successes and failures. For instance, he was always dissatisfied by the paucity of his Mexican films’ budgets. When he made Viridiana in Spain, he wrote, “I had a reasonable budget for once”. The low budgets of Los Olvidados and Nazarin actually helped those films, but The Exterminating Angel required some expense, which Buñuel was unable to do. 

When Buñuel mentioned The Exterminating Angel in his memoir, he was somewhat apologetic: [It] was made in Mexico, although I regret that I was unable to shoot it in Paris or London with European actors and adequate costumes. Despite the beauty of the house where it was shot and my effort to select actors who didn't look particularly Mexican, there was a certain tawdriness in many of its aspects... The Exterminating Angel is one of the rare films I've sat through more than once, and each time I regret its weaknesses, not to mention the very short time we had to work on it. Basically, I simply see a group of people who couldn't do what they wanted to – leave a room.(2) 

Almost from the outset of the film it becomes clear that something strange is happening inside a palatial house. Most of the servants are leaving or preparing to leave. Then the party guests arrive through the front doors and proceed upstairs – twice. Even before the party is underway, the chef and his assistant put on their coats and depart, apologizing to the mistress of the house, who tells them never to return. There is a small bear and a bunch of sheep in the kitchen, which were going to be used as part of the evening’s entertainment. They appear later in the film when the guests find they cannot leave the room to which they adjourned after dinner. Starving, the guests attack the sheep, slaughter them and roast them using wood from the floor. Eventually, an old man dies of natural causes, and a young couple close themselves in a cupboard and commit suicide. 

The problem with many of Buñuel’s films that have surrealist elements, but that aren’t entirely surrealist, is the narrative either overtakes them or is seriously disrupted by them. The gathering of dinner party guests in their gowns and tuxedoes follows a predictable course as night gives way to day and then to night again. Their manners deteriorate, their tempers flare, they undo their restrictive clothing and loosen their restrictive morals. The premise that some invisible force blocks them from getting out and everyone else outside from getting in works like a kind of extended Twilight Zone episode, or like a horror film. Buñuel had worked in horror films before. He had worked – uncredited – with Robert Florey on The Beast With Five Fingers, creating the scene in which a severed hand (one of Buñuel’s recurring fixations) moves through a library. A hand makes an appearance in Exterminating Angel, not to mention chicken feet. But even a horror film is ineffective if we aren’t given a reason to care about the characters. We aren’t given sufficient cause to care for any of Buñuel’s characters in The Exterminating Angel. Consequently, the degradations inflicted upon them by Buñuel’s invisible surrealist force become pointless all too quickly. 

After several tedious days, the victims of the invisible force figure out a way to release themselves from its power and leave the house. They celebrate their liberation with a thanksgiving mass, but soon discover that they are confined to the cathedral. The streets erupt in violence and a police crackdown and the film ends with a flock of sheep entering the church. Some critics found Buñuel’s apparent refusal to explain the film as audacious. But what is there to explain? However you choose to make sense of something as deliberately inexplicable as this film is justified.

Unfortunately, The Exterminating Angel has been the victim of a great deal of critical flapdoodle ever since its release. By now it’s practically received knowledge that it’s a “masterpiece.” Having first watched it in the 70s and watching it again this past week, its surrealist content now seems contrived and its jokes – always at our expense – are terribly dated. Uncomfortably poised between Viridiana and Simon of the Desert, two genuine masterpieces, The Exterminating Angel falls between two stools. 

(1) Party Going by Henry Green 2nd edition (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962). 

(2) My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983).