Salò - John Powers

On November 2, 1975, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead—murdered, police said, by a young male prostitute. However lurid its details (the Roman tabloids ran huge front-page photos of the disfigured corpse), his death struck many as metaphorically apt, and not only because of Pasolini’s known taste for rough trade. He had long had a crush on the idea of flamboyant death.

Painter, poet, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, semiotician, gay icon, renegade Marxist, public controversialist, champion of both outlaw sexuality and of a mythic view of life he termed “epic-religious,” Pasolini was not only Italy’s most important postwar intellectual but also a quintessential twentieth-century type—self-indulgent and self-despising, never sure whether to blame himself or the world for his inescapable alienation. Never keeping to one style for long, his cinematic career carried him from his gritty early ’60s films about pimps and thieves in the borgate (the impoverished shanty-town wasteland that circled Rome) to his popular ’70s “Trilogy of Life” (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights) which seemed the work of a bawdy, life-affirming man.

The happy perception suggested by the trilogy was changed forever by his final film, Salò (1975), a one-of-a-kind project that takes no little defending, and may indeed be indefensible. It’s the cruelest, most obscene, and most intellectually toxic work ever made by a major director. Once seen, it is forever remembered.

Pasolini began the film during a period of enormous artistic crisis. Filled with “disappointment in man and God” (as one friend of his described it), he began to think that all his earlier work was bogus and compromised, merely another length of the feed-tube through which consumerist repression is shoved down our throats. His response was to make what he called an “indigestible” film based on the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, with a smidgen of Dante’s Inferno thrown in. Set in Italy during the waning days of World War II, Salò tells the story of four debauched Fascists who retreat to a chateau and begin using innocents to satisfy their basest desires. Beginning with mere violation in the “Circle of Obsessions” (sodomy is favored), they move on to the “Circle of Shit” (people forced to eat their own feces) before reaching the “Circle of Blood,” in which skulls are smashed, eyeballs sliced, and victims ritualistically slaughtered.

1 2