Buñuel’s Messy Law and the “Extimate” Image in El ángel exterminador and La Mort en ce jardin

Abstract

Luis Buñuel’s notable Mexican film El ángel exterminador (1962) and his less familiar Mexican–French film La Mort en ce jardin (1956) coincide in their interest in portraying overbearing spaces of entrapment within which customs and rules of order reach points of exhaustion. With readings informed by elements of Lacanian thought, this paper explores the emergence of a messy, defective law and its implications for the mediatory qualities of language and the experience of subjectivity. I begin by arguing that the films make use of failures in communication to disrupt the paternal myth and the law of the signifier as these concepts are discussed in Lacanian thought. I then examine how these same disorienting forces also affect the imaginary support of the unified subject: Buñuel’s camera often reduces the prefigured image of subjects into piecemeal assemblages of partial objects or blends these images with surroundings. This paper concludes with a discussion of how El ángel generates visual lacunae that respond to this disorder. Unlike in La Mort, which portrays an authority that attempts to impose order in response to these gaps, El ángel produces sense through them, in a function understood by the term “extimacy.” This concept describes a foundation that is simultaneously intimate and exterior, and it is crucial to affirm the singularity of the subject before the mechanical operations of the signifier.

RESUMEN

La destacada película mexicana El ángel exterminador (1962) y la menos conocida película méxico–francesa La Mort en ce jardin (1956) de Luis Buñuel representan espacios de confinamiento dentro de los que las costumbres y las normas llegan hasta el límite y se extinguen. Este artículo se basa en lecturas infundidas por elementos del pensamiento lacaniano para explorar la aparición de una ley defectuosa y los efectos de tal ley en la capacidad mediadora del lenguaje y la experiencia de la subjetividad. En primer lugar, analizo cómo las películas utilizan fracasos comunicativos para interrumpir el mito del padre y la ley del significante tal como se presentan en el pensamiento lacaniano. Luego examino cómo estas mismas fuerzas de desorientación afectan el apoyo imaginario del sujeto único: la cámara convierte la imagen prefigurada del sujeto en piezas fragmentadas de objetos parciales o mezcla esta imagen con los entornos. El artículo concluye con una discusión sobre cómo El ángel genera lagunas visuales para responder a este desorden. A diferencia de La Mort, que acude a una autoridad para establecer orden frente a vacíos de sentido, El ángel genera sentido a través de tales vacíos, según una función entendida por el término “extimidad.” Este concepto describe una fundación del sujeto que es simultáneamente íntima y exterior y es imprescindible para afirmar la singularidad del sujeto frente a las operaciones repetitivas y mecánicas del significante.

Keywords:

• Buñuel
• Lacan
• law
• image
• language
• surrealism

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Buñuel
• Lacan
• ley
• imagen
• lenguaje
• surrealismo

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Cristina Moreiras-Menor for her feedback on a very early version of this article manuscript and for introducing me to Jacques-Alain Miller’s text on Extimacy, which proved fundamental.

Disclosure Statement

The author has not declared any potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Despite working closely with his screenwriter, the director failed to create a satisfying product: “Raymond Queneau showed up at one point and spent two weeks with me trying to help rewrite, but the script remained impossible. Queneau had a lovely sense of humor and infinite tact; he never said he didn’t like something or that something wasn’t good, but always began his criticisms with ‘I wonder if…’” (1985, 214).

2 Rob Stone notes that for Buñuel and other artists in the Generation of 1927, “Surrealism was an attempt to express the workings of the subconscious mind as a corrective to propriety and censure. Film was an important battle between instinct and reason because it allowed for the cultivation of the incongruous” (2007, 24).

3 Here and in the pages that follow, I use the term extimacy as Jacques Alain Miller discusses it in his seminar published in Spanish as Extimidad (1985–1986) (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Campbell

David Campbell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research and teaching consider questions of memory and loss in late twentieth-century Spain. He is currently completing a dissertation that examines melancholy, trauma, anxiety, and mourning in the cultural production of the Spanish post-dictatorship.