“The Exterminating Angel” must be the simplest allegory film ever made. A group of wealthy individuals attend a dinner party, retire to the drawing room and then cannot bring themselves to leave.
The message? All of us are sheep to the conventions of society. Stripped of those conventions, human dignity slowly deteriorates until we reveal ourselves as nothing but animals.
And yet the concept is so simple that we think there must be more to it. Luis Bunuel tried to teach us with his first film, “Un Chien Andalou,” that we read too deeply into narrative, and yet here we make the same mistake to look for a riddle where there is none. Surely there must be some other force withholding them, but then again these are the conventions of society, this time established by Hollywood, taking over.
Bunuel doesn’t wait long before hinting at surrealism. The large dinner party enters into the foyer of a luxurious mansion, and the host looks around for his butler, strangely not there. Fail to pay attention, and you’ll miss Bunuel virtually repeat the moment.
The group’s conversation is all mildly peculiar, either subtly perverse or mysterious. One couple is madly in love, another is dying of cancer and a third has just recovered and is now infatuated with the doctor.
These details matter to an extent, but typically in one-room movies such as this, some characters are heavily developed while others serve as supporting players. Bunuel’s film uses all of his people as blank slates, individual chess pieces in this elaborate and silly game (watch the movie and you’ll understand that reference).
At first their inability to leave starts as simple social criticisms. Petty judgments about removing a suit jacket are whispered throughout the drawing room, and although everyone is tired, no one wants to betray the hospitality of the host by being the first to leave.
They all remain over night, and the following morning Bunuel has his characters call attention to their predicament. Each has their own perspective as to why they stayed, whether they were too tired or just enjoyed the company too much. But there’s no real answer to explain what halts these people in their tracks, and still no one can bring themselves to do anything about it.
Bunuel’s characters are slaves to their own impulses to be polite and sick at the thought of doing otherwise. They have conviction to act but no follow-through or backbone.
They predictably blame their blue-collar servants, who mysteriously left the mansion before the party began. One goes so far as to suggest that lower income people simply experience less pain. The next reaction is to jump to bizarre conclusions, like no one has come to save them not because they are idiots and hypocrites but because something in the world has gone horribly wrong.
Bunuel drew similar comparisons to the elite class in “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” but in that film all the characters do is leave the party, never actually sitting down to eat.
And at the end of the day when characters have withheld food and medicine, hidden away in closets and plotted to murder the host, we realize these are cruel characters in a cruel film, no matter how nice and polite they try to come across.
They’re biting criticisms, and Bunuel uses careful tact and pacing as their actions get stranger and more perverse. He slowly drowns us in madness and never goes for a punch line. In this way, the level of absurdity becomes so great and yet we believe it all to be plausible.
The film’s greatest paradox however is its ease and simplicity. The characters both inside and outside the room seem to echo what the audience may be thinking. “There must be something else going on! It shouldn’t be this easy for us to just leave!”
Consider the rescue squad just outside the mansion. A captain says he sent a team of soldiers to go inside but not one of them could make it. A crowd of curious onlookers storms the mansion demanding to know what’s happening, and even they halt just at the gate’s entrance line. All of these people are perplexed by the obvious simplicity of the situation, and that’s what halts them. Society has dictated there should be complications, and when someone like a child can actually break through the barrier with ease, no one seems to fully understand why.
“The Exterminating Angel” is hardly as surreal as “The Discreet Charm” or “Un Chien Andalou,” but there must be skeptics coming across Bunuel and being infuriated by his clever, almost manipulative scenarios. They feel there must be a puzzle piece he’s not telling us when we see a bear and three sheep wandering the mansion, but we know better.
