Housed Nowhere and Everywhere Shut In: Uncanny Dwelling in Luis Buñuel's El ángel exterminador
2016; Routledge; Volume: 93; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14753820.2016.1178508
ISSN1478-3428
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoEl ángel exterminador (1962), Luis Buñuel's penultimate Mexican film, depicts the implausible imprisonment of a group of upper-class dinner guests who cannot leave the room they have retired to after their meal, while the servants have inexplicably abandoned their employers' mansion. Traditionally, the film has invited Marxist readings predicated on an inside/outside binary, whereby the bourgeoisie inside the mansion are trapped by their privilege and the home help waiting outside are excluded by the lack of theirs. This article moves beyond politically motivated readings of the film to consider its weight as a philosophical and aesthetic exploration of dwelling through the concept of the uncanny. The film's mansion bears all the hallmarks of Freudian uncanny, replete with symbolic imagery taken straight from Freud's renowned aesthetic exploration of what is at once familiar and unknown. However, I contend that, as the house crumbles around the imprisoned guests, the Freudian uncanny of the unheimlich home is supplanted by a more general, pervasive ‘not-being-at-home’, rooted in anxiety, that Martin Heidegger associates with the uncanny. This shift in focus frees the movie from auteur-centric psychoanalytical interpretation as the film text suggests an ethical and philosophical comment on what it means to be authentically ‘at-home’.
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