Figures of Anguish in El ángel exterminador by Luis Buñuel (1962)

Abstract

This article analyzes El ángel exterminador (1962) by Luis Buñuel as the materialization of a nightmare. It argues that what is essential to art is not its communicative function, but the type of experience it generates, and that in this film the central experience is one of profound anguish, analogous to that which characterizes Sigmund Freud’s “anxiety dreams.” The methodology employed is textual analysis grounded in text theory. Anguish manifests itself through a constant dissociation between the characters’ behavior and their consciousness, and between language and action. The incessant repetitions of actions and dialogue, described as arranged in a “broken record” structure and directly associated with the absurd situation of confinement, correspond closely to the experiences of paralysis and helplessness that are characteristic of nightmares. The set design is key: the room of confinement is configured as a theatrical stage, with doors that, paradoxically, entrap. Figures such as the winged “female angels” and the triptych of wardrobes (which conceal death and excrement) reinforce the idea of inescapable enclosure and a regression to the scatological. The clock with Cupid and Psyche expresses the impossibility of the loving act, the second “impossible act” of the nightmare. The house is interpreted as the “mother” of childhood, associated with a paradoxically empty “primal scene” devoid of the sexual act, which generates coldness and repetition. The paintings of women that exchange positions or disappear give form to that maternal figure that withholds affection and sustenance and therefore appears simultaneously as an object of aggression. The final confinement in the church, presided over by the Virgin, confirms that liberation is an illusion, repeating the nightmare of the impossibility of action.