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But Why Is It Called The Exterminating Angel?
Nice essay about a great film, perhaps Bunel’s best. But can anyone tell me why the name The Exterminating Angel?
The plot is easy to summarize, though the characters’ motivations remain mysterious. Buñuel describes it as “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.” For equally inexplicable reasons, after preparing dinner for the guests, all but one of the servants feel compelled to flee the mansion. Trapped in the living room, the guests soon begin to panic. The narrative places us in the same position as the guests, puzzling over why they can’t leave, how they might escape, and what it all means.
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Enrique Vila-Matas Interview
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Dramaturgical pretense?
There’s something about accusing somebody of being theatrical while also outdoing them by incorrectly using the word ‘dramaturgical.’ Really is.
As for the title, when he’s not directly referencing a character or a textual source (Viridiana, Tristna, Belle de Jour, et al), Buñuel will frequently resort to senselessness, sometimes a kind of senselessness that seems to suggest some deeper sense even as it has none, like Le phantôme de la liberté or Un chien andalou or L’age d’or. What, after all, is the titular ‘discreet charm’ of the bourgeoisie? Or the obscure object of desire?
I haven’t seen the film, but I imagine the title refers either to the angel that murdered the firstborn of all the Egyptians (Exodus), or maybe the angel that slaughtered Senacharib’s army in their sleep (Book of Judges).
So there may be some connection between a dinner party and the Passover meal. But being trapped in a living room, unable to leave? Beats me.
That’s what I was investigating. You’re right. there’s a DH Lawrence line ‘It is the three strange angels/admit them, admit them’. Also the angels that visited Lot in Sodom (and had an odd reception by some unfriendly townfolk) and the angel who held the sword up to Baalam as he was about to go and curse the Jews at the pay of Ba’alak, and lets not forget the angel who stood at the entrance of Gan Eden to bar Adam and Eve’s return AFTER they had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, thereby losing ‘Life’ (cross reference Baudelaire ‘Litany of Satan). Biblical ‘angels’ cerubim, seraphim, oophim etc (all the various layers in the pantheon) are NOT renaissance putti!!! Anyway, I was asking because I’m calling my new company ‘Exterminating Angel’ because I, like angel Mikhail, Exterminate Clutter. No, I’m not a nice guy who holds these crazy hoarding hands and pretends to ‘organize’. I call in dumpsters and clean the place out, just wanted to make sure that ‘Exerminating Angel’ didn’t have any neonazi skinhead stuff attached.
Da Svetanya
Spencer Amos Shears
A clue? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_de_Sores
IMDB has this to say:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056732/faq
Luis Buñuel had originally called it The Outcasts of Providence Street. Then, renaming it El ángel exterminador after he had seen the name from an unfinished play in which his friend José Bergamín was writing at the time.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056732/trivia
The title was taken from a friend of Buñuel, José Bergamin, who was writing a play with that title but never finished it. When Buñuel wanted to title his film, he asked for the rights of the title from his friend, but he answered that there was no trouble, because it was taken from the Bible, the Book of Revelations.
The Exterminating Angel is a name for the angel Abaddon, the angel of the abyss and king of the locusts in Revelation 9:7-11. The text of the Vulgate gives him 3 names: in Hebrew Abaddon, in Greek Apollyon, in Latin Exterminans. That might suggest that Buñuel himself is the angel, casting the characters into an abyss of their own decadence – with no possibility of exit.
Un Chien Andalou is not, I would argue, senseless. You might accuse him of obscurity with that one, but not senselessness. The Andalusian dog of the title is reportedly Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca, Bunuel, and Dali were “friends” for a time, but then, as the story is told, Bunuel and Dali paired off, so to speak, and ganged up against Lorca, mercilessly making fun of him for, among many other things, his “feyness” (and you can read that as “his homosexuality”; I do). Lorca, whom they saw as a bit of a “hillbilly,” if you will, or “gypsy,” had also spent the early part of his career celebrating the Andalusian folk songs, dance, and art, and the cante jondo (deep song) and romancero gitano (gypsy ballads).
At any rate, Un Chien Andalou is a coded attack on Lorca. Some sources (the ubiquitous, and, um…often ridiculous?) Wikipedia states that Lorca “perhaps erroneously” “interpreted it” this way.
Some say Lorca was in love with Dali; at any rate, their attachment/friendship is usually described as “passionate” and quite intense. That is, until Bunuel came along and apparently stepped in between them.
This is perhaps way off point, but I for some reason felt the need to at least “defend” that title. Cruel? Perhaps. Senseless? I would disagree.
P.S. Jacques de Sores as source of that particular title makes complete sense to me in light of the film.