Thursday, May 25, 2017

Film Analysis: Salo: Or the 120 Days of Sodom

On November 2, 1975, Italian Marxist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered by a street hustler in Rome. His final work, Salo: Or the 120 Days of Sodom, debuted in Paris less than a month later. Based off The Marquis de Sade’s infamous manuscript The 120 Days of Sodom, the film concerns four Mussolini-era fascist libertines (The Duke, Bishop, President and Magistrate) who methodically torture 18 captives in a secluded villa. The structure evokes Dante’s Inferno: each titular “Circle” plunges its subjects into deeper debaucheries, climaxing in ritualistic murder.
Salo represents an angry inversion of Pasolini’s previous Trilogy of Life; gone is his nostalgia for the simplistic sexual freedom of a pre-modern world. Instead, the director lurches bitterly into the present, condemning capitalism as another fascism through which bodies are corrupted into apathetic consumerist objects. Pasolini particularly laments the cultural demise of Italy’s proletarian and peasant classes, whose pre-industrial individualism had since fallen to homogeneous bourgeoisie mimicry. The victimized teens in Salo thus reflect an idealized naivete, only insofar as it can be degraded. It is fitting then, in a twist of macabre irony, that Pasolini died the way he did. The director’s controversial adoration of youthful male hustlers had once embodied his affinity for society’s economic outcasts; it was as if his life could not withstand the denouncement of this ideal.
In dissenting from his earlier work, Pasolini effectively confuses the boundaries of power and nature. In The Trilogy of Life, human instincts do battle with institutions; one vignette in The Decameron features a group of nuns abandoning their piety for sexual emancipation. As Salo’s libertines indulge themselves in a frenzy of unhinged urges, sexuality is seemingly more irrepressible than ever; however, it paradoxically functions alongside totalitarianism. Human nature and power become one in the same, as the libertines contrive a perfectly insular environment in tune with their own desires. At one point, the Duke proclaims that “the one true anarchy is that of power.” The exaggerated absurdity of the libertines’ decrees enunciate the artificiality of rules and laws through which society manufactures natural orders; for society’s advancement, these “natures” must be followed as if genuine. The nature of a fascist state is perhaps most relentlessly arbitrary, as unchecked power suckles at its own teat. In keeping with Pasolini's overarching critique, capitalism is positioned within the same oppressive dynamic.
There is no room for other institutions within the libertines’ absolute power. Religion is forbidden as per the rule book; at first contradictory, the villa’s various iconographical statues make sense as impotent bystanders positioned to mock their once-sanctified purpose. The institution of marriage, a totem of traditional values surrounding sex, is repeatedly debased. Two captives become a Biblical first couple, ceremoniously joined as their peers stand naked in procession; in another ceremony, gaudily-dressed libertines are wed to their guards while the Bishop presides in outlandish Pagan regalia. The joke is that, as the libertines cling to their own rules whilst condemning others, Pasolini has already marked all rules as absurd.
A final central component of Salo is its complication of the audience’s voyeurism. A voyeur achieves gratification by viewing arousing acts through a safe distance such as a screen; by isolating imagery through a barrier, we can be absolved of our responsibility as active viewers. A watcher of pornography consumes neatly curated sex, contentedly removed from pornography’s underlying relational processes. We are moreover fulfilled by our passive fetishization of general commodities, detached from their labor processes in a capitalist state. By contrast, there is nothing arousing in Salo: the cinematography is mechanically desolate, leering starkly in wide shots at interchangeably-naked bodies and elucidating the cold precision of the villa’s looming architecture. Fascism, capitalism and pornography all dictate a certain complicity; Salo’s visual language forces a jarring awareness of this complicity, holding us uncomfortably accountable as spectators to re-evaluate our consumption of onscreen sexuality. As the libertines sit safely in their tower to take turns in viewing The Circle of Blood’s climactic courtyard executions, we are fittingly on their side of the binoculars.


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