‘The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there is no explanation.’
Caption at the beginning of ‘The Exterminating Angel’

Luis Bunuel’s 1962 film ‘The Exterminating Angel’ begins with an aristocratic dinner party on Providence Street. Curiously, as the guests arrive, the stewards, cooks and domestics are busy making excuses and slipping away from the mansion. 

'The help becomes more impertinent each day.’

Nonetheless a skeleton staff remains, and the visitors enjoy a long, indulgent feast, peppered with hearsay, slander and sharp remarks. After dinner they stroll into the drawing room for more drinks and a piano recital. So successful is the evening that the guests seem reluctant to leave. Some take preliminary steps towards going, but don’t quite get round to it. They begin to overstay their welcome.

Gradually it becomes apparent that, for one reason or another, the guests can’t leave. There is an invisible barrier at the edge of the drawing room – something psychological, not physical - that they just don’t feel able to cross.

'Wouldn't it be a good joke if I sneaked up and pushed you out?'
'Try it, and I'll kill you.’ 

Eventually they all bed down where they have been partying. But after an uncomfortable night they wake up confronting the same problem. They want to leave, but they cannot. 

The group’s self-control and composure deteriorate. They argue with each other, plot and conspire. The old and infirm fall ill. Some of the guests conceal a corpse in a cupboard. And in another a couple conducts a romantic tryst. They slaughter some hapless sheep that have wandered into the room, and turn to Masonic codes and Kabbalah rituals. A woman sees a severed hand crawl across the room towards her. She squashes it with a desk ornament.

‘We turned this room into a gypsy campground.'

As the internment continues, a crowd of onlookers gathers outside. But they are equally incapable of breaking the deadlock. To add to the confusion Bunuel repeats certain short sequences of the film, creating the impression that the characters are stuck in some sort of time loop. 

Over the years critics have endeavoured to interpret ‘The Exterminating Angel.’ It seems to be a dark satire on the thin veneer of civilisation, the savagery that lies just beneath social etiquette and proprieties; on the hopelessly detached world of the elite, and their condescension towards the lower orders. Some have proposed that Bunuel was specifically criticising Franco’s regime in his native Spain. 

'I believe the common people, the lower class people, are less sensitive to pain. Haven't you ever seen a wounded bull? Not a trace of pain.'

More broadly ‘The Exterminating Angel’ implies that communities, cultures and corporations are prone to inertia, to repeating anachronistic behaviours and beliefs even when they have determined to change; that we are not as free as we may think.

Boxed in by consensus, custom and convention, we consistently struggle to accept that the world no longer conforms to our cosmology; that things have moved on. We claim we want to break free, but we don’t know how to.

In the communications industry, for all our visionary talk of new models, new platforms and new behaviours, we have in the past found it hard to change. We create initiatives and frameworks, launch disciplines and departments, coin phrases and aphorisms. But we remain addicted to habitual practices and familiar routines. 

Of course, as we emerge from the pandemic, we have a better chance than ever to reinvent the industry. New ways of working have already been embraced. Agile thinking comes more naturally now. Nothing is quite as it was. Perhaps finally we will be able to leave the party.

At the end of ‘The Exterminating Angel’ the bourgeois guests manage to escape the cursed mansion. They attend a church service to give thanks – only to find they have been trapped once again by an unseen force. Outside the church there are gunshots and riots on the streets. Bunuel seems to be suggesting that revolution is the only answer.

'We wouldn't change this thing even if we could somehow.
Cause the darkness of this house has got the best of us.
There's a darkness in this town that's got us too.
But they can't touch me now.
And you can't touch me now.
They ain't gonna do to me
What I watched them do to you.

So say goodbye, it's Independence Day.
It's Independence Day
All down the line.
Just say goodbye, it's Independence Day.
It's Independence Day this time.'

Bruce Springsteen, ‘Independence Day'

No. 325