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.