Hypnosis in The Exterminating Angel : Chapter 2 Part 3 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962)
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A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream…. On the screen, as within the human being the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious begins. –Luis Buñuel (quoted in Kyrou: 109-111) |
In contrast to The Exorcist’s archaic theory of hypnosis as possession, The
Exterminating Angel explores it as a sociological effect, comparable to the way
growing laughter in an audience reinforces each member’s expectation that the performance
is comic (an effect counterfeited by laugh tracks). Based on an unpublished play
by Jose Bergamin, Luis Buñuel’s surrealistic script for The Exterminating
Angel (in collaboration with Luis Alcoriza) anatomizes the frustration of party
guests mutually mesmerizing each other into a repetition compulsion. One of the them
remarks, “We are all victims of a joke in bad taste,” which statement the critic
David Shipman considers “a comment on two thousand years of Christianity” (Shipman
815), though its actual target is even larger, the way society maintains a sense
of normalcy.
Long after production, Luis Buñuel's son, Juan Luis, recalled his father's explanations: “As to the repetition of events–there are some twenty identical repetitions–it is just an idea he had. He says, ‘in everyday life we repeat ourselves every day. Every morning we get up, we brush our teeth with the same brush and with the same hand and movements, we sit at the same breakfast table, we go to the same office, meet the same people–and how many times has it happened in a party where we say hello to someone and an hour later we again shake hands, say hello, and then exclaim, “Oh, what are we doing, we just said hello a minute ago”’” (Juan Luis Buñuel 255). Buñuel, however, told Juan Luis not to reveal during the film's debut at Cannes this vision of life as trancelike, pointless iteration. Instead, he was to pretend that Buñuel only added repetitions to keep the movie from being “too short” (Edwards 171). By rendering them mysterious, however, his repetitions acquire hypnotic potential for the audience–like what befalls the characters. Buñuel hoped to shake the spectators’ presumably bourgeois identities. Granted that he has managed something like Erickson’s confusion technique, is he really giving the unconscious free reign or is he guiding it? Whereas The Exorcist warns against the unconscious from a relatively conservative stance, The Exterminating Angel fosters a comparable pathology, but from a supposedly liberal agenda. Buñuel’s basic plot tells of unconscious impulses leading to weird disaster. Thus, whatever he intended, instead of teaching trust in the unconscious, it shows subliminal effects (his own included) as treacherous.
He preceded the French version of the film with a disclaimer: “If the film which you are about to see seems to you enigmatic or incongruous, that is how life is also. The film is repetitious, like life, and, like life again, subject to many interpretations. The author declares that it was not his intention to play with symbols, at least not consciously. Perhaps the best explanation for The Exterminating Angel, is that rationally, there is none.” The audience, thus, is being asked to pay attention unconsciously to a repetitive, enigmatic film–the preconditions for hypnotic influence.
To Buñuel, the surface of life is both vain and corrupt.
In an interview, he remarked: “Morality–middle-class morality, that is ... for me
immoral. One must fight it. It is a morality founded on our most unjust social institutions–religion,
fatherland, family culture–everything that people call the pillars of society” (Richie
1978, 111).
Another source of incongruity in his attitudes, his anti-religious sentiment springs
from a religious origin. In an unpublished autobiography, composed (1938) for the
New York Museum of Modern Art, Buñuel reminisced; “I feel it necessary to
say here (since it explains in part the trend of the modest work which I later accomplished)
that the two basic sentiments of my childhood, which stayed with me well into adolescence,
are those of a profound eroticism, at first sublimated in a great religious faith,
and a permanent consciousness of death” (Aranda 12). He also recalls observing, in
the Jesuit school he attended, pupils engaging in auto-eroticism before a statue
of the Madonna (Durgnat 1977, 125). After that adolescence, he accepted the Freudian
dogma that religion was disguised sex. He could, though, never break his fascination
with the so-called mere “disguise,” religious imagery. Furthermore, while explaining
to Max Aub his obsession with sin and death in The Exterminating Angel, he
admitted a feeling that sex itself is almost infernal.
Te Deum
That movie (despite soon becoming quite infernal itself) begins with a Te
Deum in the background. An establishing shot presents a mansion with tall windows
shaped like the arches of a Gothic cathedral. It stands on Calle De La Providencia
(Providence Street). “The sequence, like the opening of [his earlier film] Viridiana,
suggests the theme of ritual, the religious and social rites that Buñuel is
about to present to us in all their elaborate and sanctified forms. The name of the
street has a double meaning. Pointing, on the one hand, to the destiny of men and
women born to wealth and privilege, it points too to the fateful and ironic joke
that Buñuel is about to play on them” (Edwards 1982, 174). It also refers
to Divine Providence, particularly the characters' belief in such a Power. After
they realize they are unable to withdraw from the party, the majority seeks to placate
Him with the promise of a Te Deum. One woman exhorts them all to pray to the Virgin
for a miracle, and proposes a pilgrimage to Lourdes. A few guests, though, resort
to occult rituals, including the sacrifice of a sheep, and use of mysterious keys.
“Keys, keys, keys,” the medium mutters. “Yes, magic objects to open the doors of
the Unknown [the Unconscious?].” Through their ritual, these attempts to escape may
actually deepen the imprisoning trance.
During the opening section, one domestic after another deserts their exploiters. Only the Jesuit-educated butler, the pinnacle of the servant hierarchy, remains. Without his staff, however, he collapses in overpowering depression. Thus progressively left to themselves, the guests find that some mesmeric force saps their will, preventing them from leaving one section of the mansion. Unable to reach the washrooms, they eventually make do with an urn in a closet. Several women have mystic visions in that seclusion, probably derived from Buñuel's Freudian identification of religion with human plumbing. (Similarly, the guests describe each other’s actions with such Freudian terms as “transference” and label one woman's virginity a “perversion.”) They repeatedly wonder if they are insane and call their (in)voluntary prison/sanctuary a “madhouse.”
Whether the characters' entombing themselves in the mansion symbolizes
a Freudian death urge, it does literally lead toward deaths. Two lovers commit suicide.
One man lies dying for the want of medicine that could easily be procured if anyone
had the will to escape. All know they will eventually starve if they do not leave.
As if in deep trance, they suffer hallucinations. Notably a hand crawls into the
room, presumably from a corpse. It chokes a woman. There is concern for the soul
of the man, said to have died in “mortal sin.” At those words (probably representing
another delusion), a choir on the sound track sings in Latin a plea to be liberated
from the eternal death of hell, damnation being a condition also usually depicted
as painful repetition. In a somewhat less sinister mirage, the Pope appears on a
hill, but he is likened to a “warrior,” making him another death-bringer.
Encore
Finally, a woman notices that the guests have returned to their original positions.
At her insistence, they reenact what they were doing when they first fell under the
spell. The pianist again plays a sonata of Paradisi and is again asked for one by
the very similar composer Scarlatti. At last, the guests feel that their obsession
has run its course and that they can depart. They have used a new trance to counter
the old one– a hypnosis that Buñuel told Jose de la Colina and Tomas Erez
Turrent was designed for the audience as well (Buñuel, Turrent, and Colina
161). Alas, being still entranced, the former guests’ freedom is short lived. They
confine themselves in a cathedral, hearing the promised Te Deum while a revolution
breaks out in the streets around them.
As the occultists did in their séance, they hold hands in this cathedral. Also during their first confinement, members of the Masonic Brotherhood resorted to a ritual handshake and spoke the Forbidden Word (a form of the unpronounceable name of God). As with ritual hand holding in such tribal rites as the Sioux Ghost Dance, the people evoke solidarity. Quickly, however, in the movie, each time it succumbs to their equally deep rage and petulance. At one point, the guests contemplate murdering Nobilé, the host, in the hope that this human sacrifice will somehow cancel the spell.
Buñuel presents incoherence not merely in the emotional distance separating people (physically packed together). Even the detritus and debris of the room (e.g., the sheep under the table or garbage in a silver bowl) appear as barely related objects in what Elizabeth Ermarth calls Buñuel’s characteristically “paratactic” technique–irrationally juxtaposed images (Ermath 90). Of cinema in general, she theorizes that, during the modern period, movies chose visual metaphors to represent time. In contrast, postmodern works substitute a sense of rhythm, i.e., repetition of the juxtaposed (Ermath 45). The change has the following significance. A work focusing on one image constitutes a single, unified meaning. Rhythm, however, leads to “multilevel thinking,” as each reoccurrence brings a new nuance (Ermath 88). And it consequently, contributes to the Ericksonian intellectual overload or confusion that augments any hypnotic effect while the theme of immobility paces an inherently static audience.
Buñuel’s intention, however, was not to program immobility
into the audience. To him, the film is a reductio ad absurdum of being bound
by habit. As he remarked to Elena Poniatowska, “reality is multiple, and for different
people it can have a hundred different meanings. I want to have a total vision of
reality, to enter the marvelous world of the unknown” (Ado Kyrou, Luis Buñuel
125). As one might expect from his intellectual Marxism, his approach is Graves’s
stage six with its emphasis on adding to knowledge by multiplying perspectives; and
his use of hypnosis is designed to let the unconscious run wild rather than to program
a message. Perhaps, he would have had more hope of achieving this if he had revealed
his mesmeric intentions, but he was working at a time when hypnotists did not expect
patients to cooperate in their own therapeutic trances. And during production, he
expected it to be his last film, a final enigma to crown his career.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter
2 part 4
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