SUMMER 2010
Jonathan Shia | April 20, 2010
In her 1922 book Etiquette and Society, American manners maven Emily Post instructed, “That the guest of honor must be first to take leave was in former times so fixed a rule that everyone used to sit on and on, no matter how late it became, waiting for her whose duty it was, to go! But to-day, although it is still the obligation of the guest who sat on the host’s right to make the move to go, it is not considered ill-mannered, if the hour is growing late, for another lady to rise first.” But forty years later, Spanish director Luis Buñuel showed that the terror of committing the faux pas of being the first to go was still of great concern to the haute bourgeoisie. In his 1962 film The Exterminating Angel, out today on DVD from the Criterion Collection, the assembled guests at a post-opera dinner party find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the room, each deciding without hesitation to spend the night. Their hosts have no choice but to extend their generosity and offer to let them stay, and departure becomes impossible as the partygoers find themselves confined to the well-appointed living room for weeks.
In one of his most legendary skewerings of upper-class social strictures, Buñuel traps his characters in a prison of their own making, where each dinner guest is torn between propriety and animal desperation as the last vestiges of civilized life are tossed across the threshold with the garbage. As the inmates become increasingly frenzied, the film takes on the air of a disaster movie, with the assembled nouveaux riches forced to rely on their limited survival skills, to assorted tragic outcomes. This being Buñuel, Surrealist grace notes abound: a bear climbs a pillar in the dining room, a disembodied hand scrambles across the floor. Meanwhile, those outside the premises, including the household servants—an obvious stand-in for the audience—find themselves as unable to enter as the guests are to leave. As in many of his films, Buñuel mocks spirituality in all of its forms by showing the guests making appeals to the gods of Kabbalah, witchcraft, Freemasonry, and Buñuel’s personal bête noire, Catholicism (his sardonic Simon of the Desert is out today from Criterion as well).
But The Exterminating Angel is ultimately a work of social rather than religious commentary. The rich are fools who deserve to punished, and the poor are no better for their desire to adopt the same mores. One host demonstrates the upper class’s twisted idea of decorum when he comments, on the first night, on the shame his guests will surely feel when they realize that the sin of abusing generosity is worse than that of rejecting it. “I’d like to spare them the embarrassment,” he says, removing his jacket. “Let’s meet them at their level to make their faux pas less obvious.”
The Exterminating Angel is out today from the Criterion Collection.
KEYWORDS: DVDs, film, Luis Bunuel, surrealism, The Criterion Collection
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