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SALÒ,
or the 120 Days of Sodom, the final film by Pier
Paolo Pasolini, owes its considerable notoriety not just
to the unrelenting parade of degradation and torture
that it serves up on-screen but also to an unfortunately
resonant act of off-screen brutality. On November 2,
1975, just weeks after the movie was completed,
Pasolini’s mutilated body was discovered in a vacant lot
outside Rome. Police investigations concluded that he
had been killed by a 17-year-old boy he had attempted to
pick up.
A lapsed
Catholic and a gay Marxist, Pasolini was the provocative
sum of his contradictions. He was a true polymath—a
filmmaker, poet, novelist and playwright—and a habitual
firebrand, an outspoken public intellectual who made no
secret of his homosexuality or his taste for teenage
rough trade. And as with so many artists who die
violently or before their time, his demise quickly
became the prism through which his work—Salò in
particular—was viewed. Michelangelo Antonioni remarked
that Pasolini had been “the victim of his own
characters.”
More
than three decades later, it finally might be possible
to free Salò from the shadow of Pasolini’s grisly
death. The alleged killer recanted his confession a few
years ago; many people now believe that the murder was
politically motivated, undermining the once prevalent
view that it represented something of a death wish on
Pasolini’s part.
As for
the film itself, reissued this week by the Criterion
Collection in a two-disc edition richly supplemented
with essays and documentaries, its extreme,
claustrophobic force is undiluted. The 1970s was a
hotbed of scandalous art cinema, but Salò—unlike
such X-rated shockers as Last Tango in Paris or
In the Realm of the Senses—has not been tamed by
the passage of years. If anything, there is a cruel,
chilling timelessness to both its imagery and its logic.
The shock hasn’t worn off in the slightest.
While
Pasolini mingled the sacred and the profane in much of
his earlier work, Salò exists in an utterly
godless realm. It combines and explicitly links two
unmentionable subjects, transposing the Marquis de
Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, a massive and minutely
detailed catalog of sexual torture perpetrated by four
wealthy libertines in 18th century France, to the
Republic of Salò, the puppet government that Benito
Mussolini established in the final days of World War II.
The
authority figures in Salò are fascist officials
whose regimen of humiliation seems motivated less by
sexual desire than by the exercise of total power and
control. They round up nine boys and nine girls and
proceed to a remote villa, staffed with armed guards and
a few middle-aged prostitutes who set the mood by
recounting their sexual exploits in vivid detail.
Structured as a series of infernal Dantesque “circles,”
Salò progresses inexorably, as an escalation of
horrors and a descent into madness. The boys and girls
are leashed like dogs; one is force-fed food laced with
nails. Next come some truly stomach-turning experiments
in coprophagy, building to a Last Supper-like feast of
human excrement. The film culminates in a grueling
torture sequence: In an enclosed courtyard, victims are
whipped, branded and scalped, their tongues sliced and
eyeballs gouged. Meanwhile, the fascists take turns
watching from a window. Pasolini presents the grotesque
action from the captors’ point of view, from above and
through binoculars—a distancing device that forces the
viewer into the position of voyeur.
Before
embarking on Salò, Pasolini had completed a trio
of popular literary adaptations known as the Trilogy
of Life. Salò, for him, was a refutation of
the trilogy’s affirmative eroticism, which he eventually
came to view as suspect.
The
1940s setting of Salò is a bit of a red herring:
Pasolini’s premise acknowledges the perverse erotic
appeal of fascism, but his main concern was with what he
considered the “new fascism,” the rapacious rise of
consumer capitalism and its ability to reduce human
bodies to commodities. Salò is not the most
coherent political allegory—Pasolini himself said of the
film, “It does not need to be understood.” That might be
so, but as an agonized cri de coeur, a wail of
absolute despair in the face of a dehumanizing world,
its power is overwhelming. |
