In Luis Bunuel's 1962 Surrealist film The Exterminating Angel, a group of bourgeois partygoers become inexplicably trapped in a room for a prolonged time. While this paralysis reflects the fixed ideology of the bourgeois class, ideology is necessarily comfortable; therefore, a tension between ideological and physical bonds veer the characters towards discomfort. The latter indicts the vulnerability of ideology’s supposed airtightness: reduced to human dregs through an absurd crisis, the socialites experience an anguish reserved for the working class. To finally escape the plight, they recreate the initial party’s exact conditions and thus transcend anguish by reverting to their facade of values.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema proposes a similar scenario, yet complicates Bunuel’s ending. In the film, a handsome stranger infiltrates a bourgeois household and sleeps with every family member and the maid. When the stranger leaves as suddenly as he came, each person must contend with radical consequences: the maid performs miracles, the son leaves to be an artist, the wife cruises for younger men, the daughter falls into a coma, and the husband renounces his factory to the workers. In both films, a jarring event jolts the bourgeoisie from their idle complacency; however, Pasolini suggests a possible revolution while Bunuel more cynically asserts business as usual.
At the end of Teorema, the husband strips naked in public before wandering to a barren landscape and blurting a primal cry. Through an ambivalence of anguish and ecstasy, the husband confronts his humanity in an ideological void. Pasolini depicts a similar landscape in his 1969 film Porcile, this time to stage a medieval cannibal; the cannibal plot is then paired with a second story regarding bourgeois fascists. While Teorema’s landscape concludes the family’s rupture, Porcile’s is less a climax and more a lurking id. Juxtaposed with the second story’s contained mansion setting, the nomadic cannibal suggests the bourgeoisie's concealed barbarism; it is with this same principle that Bunuel's socialites descend to abasement.
While Porcile and Teorema impart the landscape as the upper class's underside, the two utterly merge in Pasolini’s 1975 film Salo: Or the 120 Days of Sodom. Released just after the director’s murder, Salo details the torture of kidnapped youths by four fascists in Mussolini's Italy. The fascists are true hedonists, in command of their every sadistic whim. Gone is the tension between rigid indoors and untamed exteriors: in Salo, the mansion is both hyper-contained and hyper-barbarous. Freed from pretense, the violent id is embraced as power’s true metric; if Bunuel’s absurdity exposes the class structure as naturally absurd, Salo proclaims its inherent violence. Pasolini here revokes Teorema’s revolutionary impulse to hammer a fatalistic death nail.
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