This article is a preview from the Summer 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
I consider consumerism to be a worse form of fascism than the classic variety — Pier Paolo Pasolini, L’Espresso
It is one of the most notorious moments in cinema – the Duke of Salò, inflamed by the tears one of the slaves is shedding for the death of her mother, squats down to defecate. The act is initially obscured by a table, but we are not spared for long – the camera draws back to show what he has done. The girl, still weeping, crawls over to the turd, and is handed a spoon and told to eat. She does, and the camera watches her, unblinking.
It is 40 years since the release of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, and time has done nothing to lessen the shock of the scene, or that which follows shortly after, where the rulers and slaves of Salò sit down to a feast of excrement. Banned in the UK for more than 25 years, the film’s notoriety was heightened by the murder of the director a month before its original release.
Pasolini’s body was found at Ostia, a beach resort outside Rome. He had been run over several times by his own car, beaten beyond recognition and his testicles crushed. At the time his death was ascribed to homosexual misadventure and a 17-year-old rent boy, Pino Pelosi, whom Pasolini had picked up the night before. Pelosi confessed to the crime, claiming he had murdered Pasolini after the director had become violent and threatened to shove a wooden stake up his rectum. From the beginning doubts were cast on Pelosi’s guilt, and he later recanted his confession. Pasolini had many enemies – he was a Marxist who railed against Marxism, a Christian who railed against the Catholic Church, and a would-be revolutionary who railed against would-be revolutionaries. Any number of groups would have been capable of his murder.
Whatever the truth concerning his death – Abel Ferrara’s 2014 film Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe, leaves the question open, despite Ferrara’s claim to know the true killer – Salò has been taken to predict and prefigure the death of its maker, particularly by those who have not seen it. And, with its notoriety and history of being banned, Salò is perhaps the greatest unseen film in history, and one of the most misunderstood.
Horrid, sad, dull freedom
and yet never before in human history has there been
any greater.
– from ‘Introduction’ in appendix to Transumanar e organizzar (Transhumanise and Organise)
Best known outside Italy as a film maker, Pasolini is as highly regarded in his own country as a poet, and it was as a poet that he saw himself first and foremost. As Stephen Sartarelli argues in the introduction to his new bilingual translation The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Chicago University Press), Pasolini adopted film as a vehicle for his poetry, one that, by crossing language barriers, could reach a wider audience.
Pasolini’s work was controversial from the beginning – his first film Accattone is about a low-life pimp and is set in the infamous borgata where Pasolini would meet his death, while his later Teorema tells the story of a mysterious Visitor (played by Terence Stamp) who enters a bourgeois household and has sex with each member, changing their lives irrevocably. When he made Salò, he had just completed his Trilogy of Life, comprising The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. Increasingly pessimistic about the effects of capitalism and consumerism, Salò was to have been the first in his Trilogy of Death.
It is Pasolini’s take on the Marquis de Sade, the notorious Enlightenment author of such books as Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue and Philosophy in the Bedroom, which critiqued complacent morality by saying the unsayable, and for which he was imprisoned. It was in the Bastille that he wrote 120 Days of Sodom in the 37 days he spent there before being transferred to an asylum. It is from this book that Salò takes its alternative title, and, as with de Sade, we are missing the point if we see only what is put before us, and not how it is done. For Salò is, in essence and in fact, a comedy of manners – a Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie with considerably higher stakes.
The film’s plot is straightforward. Four “Fascist” libertines – the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President – kidnap nine young men and nine young women, and take them to a villa near the town of Salò. (The choice of “Salò” was no accident – the real Salò was the de facto capital of Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Italian Social Republic, and it was near here that Pasolini’s brother Guido had been killed in 1945.) Accompanied by four male guards, four soldiers and four middle-aged prostitutes who tell lewd stories to inflame the men, they carry out a series of tortures and humiliations on their young victims, eventually torturing them to death.
And yet, for all its violence and degradation, Salò is a deliberately beautiful film (the pace is leisurely, the camera lingers on the sumptuous beauty of the villa), starring the rich and powerful at their most ridiculous. The prostitutes’ dull stories of depravity are told to the accompaniment of a tinkling piano, the juxtaposition of the beautiful sonatas with po-faced pronouncements such as “There are a thousand occasions where one does not desire a woman’s anus” being designed to provoke a laugh.
The film is a searing critique of consumerism, which renders everything and everyone a commodity. Pasolini’s late poems concentrate on the excesses of capitalism, and Salò takes this to its extreme – the eating of the excrement. But the critique is more complex – it is not just the victims who are deprived of their humanity through excess. The film also operates as a critique of the aristocracy. Their own morality destroyed by absolute freedom from human values, the four libertines become, for us, the viewers, figures of fun.
Throughout the film the libertines are shown in all their foolishness. They dress as old women to marry their well-hung soldier boys. When the Duke wishes to be peed on, the urine spatters on his face in a short, uneven stream. Their desire for collecting the excrement of the slaves turns them into quibbling accountants, keeping meticulous records of defecation, and has them examining chamber pots for evidence of transgressions. Even the scene where the Duke squats has him grunting like a child on the potty. They are more trapped than the slaves, by the unreal set of manners and bizarre systems of etiquette that they force themselves to follow, like our own upper classes. It is not for nothing that the opening credits, the most basic of title cards, flash up to the tune of “These Foolish Things”.
As viewers we are never made complicit in the sex or the violence. This is not “torture porn”: it never titillates, we are never “at one” with the libertines. And they, given complete freedom – “horrid, sad, dull freedom” – are never at one with passion. Their sexuality is a stunted thing and their dominant mode of being is frustration.
During the marriage scene, the libertines rail against the slaves for not enjoying themselves, for not whooping it up. In their dresses, pearls and feather boas, the rich demand rejoicing, some stage-managed flag-waving from the plebs. Situating themselves above normal human empathy, they are reduced to crying for it, and receive none. Pleasure, passion, are things that happen elsewhere.
In the film’s central sequence, the Bishop moves around the sleeping quarters, checking that all the ridiculous rules of the house are being followed. Each of the slaves, caught breaking one, immediately implicates one of their fellow slaves – here Pasolini takes aim at the complicity of the masses in their own degradation – until, finally, the libertines catch one of the slaves having sex with a serving girl. It is the one passionate sexual act of the film. The libertines raise their guns to shoot, and the slave, naked, raises a fist in the air. Confronted by the first sign of resistance, confronted by a political act, a belief system, the libertines are thrown, and their guns go limp. When they gather themselves and fire, they are shaken men. They fire more bullets than necessary, to kill what can overthrow them: love and belief.
The film ends with each of the libertines in turn sitting in a window of the villa, watching the slaves being tortured. They watch through binoculars; even this, the final act of consummation, is distant from them. The Duke fondles his husband’s penis through his trousers. True feeling is again reserved for the Other.
For Pasolini the rise of consumerist culture was creating a freedom that would eventually destroy humanity, more surely than any fascist regime. In Salò he offers three forms of resistance – love, belief and the freedom to laugh at the upper classes – seemingly confident in their power (“Nothing flatters the senses more than social privilege” – the Duke) but, ultimately, frustrated in their desires.
In the documentary that accompanies the DVD of Salò, he is shown shooting the final scenes of torture. The boys wear large and obviously prosthetic penises. The President wanders about in his underpants, performing his tortures with a small, pathetic candle. Behind the camera Pasolini has trouble keeping a straight face. “Don’t laugh,” he tells his actors, “don’t laugh.” Forty years on, if we don’t laugh at Salò – with Salò – we are missing the point.
