Whatever Happened To __________?
Ever since the 1980s when I read Enzo Siciliano's Pasolini: A Biography, I've wanted to see the director's films, coming across them haphazardly over the next three decades, with one of them, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, his final film released soon before his murder (or assassination?), standing out as a work I felt misgivings about watching, based upon what I'd read in Siciliano's book.
Earlier this year, in a used book and other media store, I found a Criterion Collection copy of Salò for $14.95 plus tax, a bargain for a two disc set in perfect condition, with the film, uncut and beautifully restored, and a disc of extra material, plus a thick little book containing six essays, film stills, and excerpts from a contemporary diary kept by a journalist observing the film's production in 1975. A boxed little treasure containing a movie described by 1970s critics as "monstrous," a "masterpiece," "unforgettable," "shocking."
On the first disc, with the film itself, there's a trailer that probably played in adults-only American theaters. It contains images of nudity and a few of the "shocking" events, plus the jarring sound of American voices coming from the actors and actresses. I had just watched the film, was still feeling stunned by its content and impact, so seeing and hearing an old trailer that emphasizes the film's lewdness without the context misses Pasolini's point emphasized in the film itself: that the combination of power and money--what he called "neocapitalism"--produces a consumer-based culture that will eat anything as it relies on a top-down model, with the rich and high political classes (and in Italy, the clerical stratum as well) acting as masters, with the bourgeoisie and poor the manipulated servants reliant on what comes from above.
The trailer simply sells sex and exploitation, precisely what the film's seven elite characters unleash upon their young victims, boys and girls, young men and women, all kidnapped by Italian Fascists with the support and protection of German occupiers in Mussolini's last political state, the Salò Republic of 1943 to 1945.
Pasolini's use of this historical place and time is less important than how he combines it with the Marquis de Sade's 1789 novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage. Four wealthy men and four women, the latter brothel keepers who tell erotic stories from their lives, take to a remote castle where, inspired by the stories, the men sexually abuse and torture thirty-six teenagers--Note, I'm admittedly paraphrasing this brief synopsis from Wikipedia since I haven't read the novel.
The novel's plot basically matches that of the film, except that the storytellers, numbering three in the movie, are so elegant and beautifully dressed I didn't think of them as "brothel keepers" but as depraved rich women, just as their male counterparts, from politics, the clergy, the nobility, and business, are also depraved. The set-up, though, is the same, with the three women telling their stories about being forced to eat shit (which gets enacted upon the victims), loss of virginity from rape, and other execrable acts all told in a singsong, monotonous, circular way, the women obsessing on certain themes that comprise the film's three main parts.
During storytelling, conducted in a big beautiful room with a huge art deco chandelier (most of the beautiful and elegant sets bely the viewer's sense that this story should take place in a dungeon), the four men running the show get up now and then to satisfy whatever urge takes them. They're mainly impotent, often frustrated by an inability to get hard or ejaculate. The often naked victims must sit or stand idly by, listening to accounts that are really anything but erotic due to their monotony. What's really happening is a demonstration of force--"Power is the only true anarchy," says the Duke, who had my vote as the most sickening of the male quartet, until the penultimate scene, when it's anyone's guess who's the most Hell-bound.
It is a horrifying film, but what I found most shocking (admittedly after just one viewing) is how the weight of the situation played on my mind, how it reminded me of the timelessness of powerful individuals using and destroying lives for their own gain. The villa is like a "Black Site," what CIA personnel (like the newly minted CIA Director Gina Haspel, who ran a secret CIA prison where torture was practiced) use as unknown locations where they can commit illegal activities, unaccountable to the government or taxpayers. The Duke tells his victims near the beginning, "No one knows you're here. You have ceased to exist."
This is what has been, and is, going on in the War on Terror. Recall that even at a non-Black Site like Guantanamo Bay, prisoners ("detainees" or "enemy combatants,"--White House lawyers changing language to make torture legal and eliminate Habeas Corpus) were tortured, denied counsel, thrown into a hole, essentially, and forgotten.
Forgetting and allowing the powerful to tell us what to remember and what to forget is how they
make the mass of ordinary people complicit with their crimes. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld didn't advertise the Salò-like horrors committed by American troops acting under orders from U.S. policymakers at Abu Ghraib Prison. It took a conscientious U.S. soldier, releasing hundreds of photographs he'd taken, for the world to find out about it, but the three men mentioned above didn't get punished for their responsibility in visiting horrors upon hundreds of Iraqi citizens, most of them innocent of any crime, but targeted in roundups by troops, just as the film's victims are rounded up and "disappeared."
When an individual, like Cleveland's kidnapper and serial killer Ariel Castro, does this kind of thing, he's condemned in the news media, but when it's government policy, the news media stays mum on the subject, thus collaborating with the kidnappers, torturers, and murderers.
It's the power structure and how it's brilliantly illuminated that most strikes me about Pasolini's film. The shock of watching people forced to eat shit, of being forced to have sex with each other under the gaze of the four powerful creeps running the show, three of whom interrupting the naked victims to satisfy their urges on them; the painful scene of victims informing upon each other to save their own lives, the penultimate scene of those condemned to die for their infractions (their names kept in a black book), makes for intense, difficult viewing.
The film is Pasolini's condemnation of the capitalism-will eat-itself world he lived in, but it's even more relevant today. Those on high in our country and elsewhere who preach philosophical systems they profess to believe in, like patriotism and democracy, are really just players in the power game, the ultimate and "true anarchy." As we know, the rules don't apply to them. Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., responsible for enforcing the Clinton era embargo on Iraq that killed a million people, including half a million children for want of essential medicines, was awarded by President Obama the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest decoration an American citizen can receive. In my view, and I think Pasolini would agree, Albright, essentially, did to those Iraqi children what the wealthy vicious psychopaths in his film do to their victims, and, in an interview, she said, "It was worth it."
Such a real person as Madeleine Albright (and she's one of many, respected in American political and journalistic/entertainment circles) isn't fit to walk free outside of a prison where she should be put for life. It could be that Pasolini's film made some so uncomfortable in the 1970s, and still does, less because of it's shocking images and sounds, and more because of its depiction of horrible (and outwardly respectable) human beings getting away with unspeakable crimes. In our world right now, people like Benjamin Netanyahu orders massacres and shootings of unarmed peaceful Palestinian protestors, in broad daylight; photographed, reported on, televised. Hitler didn't advertise his death camps. The powerful, now, have become increasingly brazen. If monsters like Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and numerous well-connected others in countries around the world are never punished, but celebrated, even lauded, as George W. Bush is now--by comparison with Donald Trump--they get away with mass murder on a scale Hitler would've admired, as he would've appreciated news media compliance with mass murder committed right out in the open by nation states. As he would've appreciated the elevation of a torturer to head a powerful intelligence agency, without significant concern from the press.
Bringing politics into this discussion of Salò is appropriate, for his chosen historical period, 1943 to 1945, was a matter of choice on Pasolini's part. The setting could've been ancient Rome, or, had he lived much longer and made the film in 2010, Abu Ghraib Prison under the American occupation.
I couldn't, offhand, name a single actor or actress in the film, but their faces, especially those of the seven depraved motherfuckers in charge, may have become permanently etched in my memory. I intend to watch the film again. I want to understand its depiction of power as anarchy so that I can recognize it when it threatens my existence on a local level, and on the big stage of the world. This is the film's true and important significance, not its shock value.
Vic Neptune
Ever since the 1980s when I read Enzo Siciliano's Pasolini: A Biography, I've wanted to see the director's films, coming across them haphazardly over the next three decades, with one of them, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, his final film released soon before his murder (or assassination?), standing out as a work I felt misgivings about watching, based upon what I'd read in Siciliano's book.
Earlier this year, in a used book and other media store, I found a Criterion Collection copy of Salò for $14.95 plus tax, a bargain for a two disc set in perfect condition, with the film, uncut and beautifully restored, and a disc of extra material, plus a thick little book containing six essays, film stills, and excerpts from a contemporary diary kept by a journalist observing the film's production in 1975. A boxed little treasure containing a movie described by 1970s critics as "monstrous," a "masterpiece," "unforgettable," "shocking."
On the first disc, with the film itself, there's a trailer that probably played in adults-only American theaters. It contains images of nudity and a few of the "shocking" events, plus the jarring sound of American voices coming from the actors and actresses. I had just watched the film, was still feeling stunned by its content and impact, so seeing and hearing an old trailer that emphasizes the film's lewdness without the context misses Pasolini's point emphasized in the film itself: that the combination of power and money--what he called "neocapitalism"--produces a consumer-based culture that will eat anything as it relies on a top-down model, with the rich and high political classes (and in Italy, the clerical stratum as well) acting as masters, with the bourgeoisie and poor the manipulated servants reliant on what comes from above.
The trailer simply sells sex and exploitation, precisely what the film's seven elite characters unleash upon their young victims, boys and girls, young men and women, all kidnapped by Italian Fascists with the support and protection of German occupiers in Mussolini's last political state, the Salò Republic of 1943 to 1945.
Pasolini's use of this historical place and time is less important than how he combines it with the Marquis de Sade's 1789 novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage. Four wealthy men and four women, the latter brothel keepers who tell erotic stories from their lives, take to a remote castle where, inspired by the stories, the men sexually abuse and torture thirty-six teenagers--Note, I'm admittedly paraphrasing this brief synopsis from Wikipedia since I haven't read the novel.
The novel's plot basically matches that of the film, except that the storytellers, numbering three in the movie, are so elegant and beautifully dressed I didn't think of them as "brothel keepers" but as depraved rich women, just as their male counterparts, from politics, the clergy, the nobility, and business, are also depraved. The set-up, though, is the same, with the three women telling their stories about being forced to eat shit (which gets enacted upon the victims), loss of virginity from rape, and other execrable acts all told in a singsong, monotonous, circular way, the women obsessing on certain themes that comprise the film's three main parts.
During storytelling, conducted in a big beautiful room with a huge art deco chandelier (most of the beautiful and elegant sets bely the viewer's sense that this story should take place in a dungeon), the four men running the show get up now and then to satisfy whatever urge takes them. They're mainly impotent, often frustrated by an inability to get hard or ejaculate. The often naked victims must sit or stand idly by, listening to accounts that are really anything but erotic due to their monotony. What's really happening is a demonstration of force--"Power is the only true anarchy," says the Duke, who had my vote as the most sickening of the male quartet, until the penultimate scene, when it's anyone's guess who's the most Hell-bound.
It is a horrifying film, but what I found most shocking (admittedly after just one viewing) is how the weight of the situation played on my mind, how it reminded me of the timelessness of powerful individuals using and destroying lives for their own gain. The villa is like a "Black Site," what CIA personnel (like the newly minted CIA Director Gina Haspel, who ran a secret CIA prison where torture was practiced) use as unknown locations where they can commit illegal activities, unaccountable to the government or taxpayers. The Duke tells his victims near the beginning, "No one knows you're here. You have ceased to exist."
This is what has been, and is, going on in the War on Terror. Recall that even at a non-Black Site like Guantanamo Bay, prisoners ("detainees" or "enemy combatants,"--White House lawyers changing language to make torture legal and eliminate Habeas Corpus) were tortured, denied counsel, thrown into a hole, essentially, and forgotten.
Forgetting and allowing the powerful to tell us what to remember and what to forget is how they
make the mass of ordinary people complicit with their crimes. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld didn't advertise the Salò-like horrors committed by American troops acting under orders from U.S. policymakers at Abu Ghraib Prison. It took a conscientious U.S. soldier, releasing hundreds of photographs he'd taken, for the world to find out about it, but the three men mentioned above didn't get punished for their responsibility in visiting horrors upon hundreds of Iraqi citizens, most of them innocent of any crime, but targeted in roundups by troops, just as the film's victims are rounded up and "disappeared."
When an individual, like Cleveland's kidnapper and serial killer Ariel Castro, does this kind of thing, he's condemned in the news media, but when it's government policy, the news media stays mum on the subject, thus collaborating with the kidnappers, torturers, and murderers.
It's the power structure and how it's brilliantly illuminated that most strikes me about Pasolini's film. The shock of watching people forced to eat shit, of being forced to have sex with each other under the gaze of the four powerful creeps running the show, three of whom interrupting the naked victims to satisfy their urges on them; the painful scene of victims informing upon each other to save their own lives, the penultimate scene of those condemned to die for their infractions (their names kept in a black book), makes for intense, difficult viewing.
The film is Pasolini's condemnation of the capitalism-will eat-itself world he lived in, but it's even more relevant today. Those on high in our country and elsewhere who preach philosophical systems they profess to believe in, like patriotism and democracy, are really just players in the power game, the ultimate and "true anarchy." As we know, the rules don't apply to them. Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., responsible for enforcing the Clinton era embargo on Iraq that killed a million people, including half a million children for want of essential medicines, was awarded by President Obama the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest decoration an American citizen can receive. In my view, and I think Pasolini would agree, Albright, essentially, did to those Iraqi children what the wealthy vicious psychopaths in his film do to their victims, and, in an interview, she said, "It was worth it."
Such a real person as Madeleine Albright (and she's one of many, respected in American political and journalistic/entertainment circles) isn't fit to walk free outside of a prison where she should be put for life. It could be that Pasolini's film made some so uncomfortable in the 1970s, and still does, less because of it's shocking images and sounds, and more because of its depiction of horrible (and outwardly respectable) human beings getting away with unspeakable crimes. In our world right now, people like Benjamin Netanyahu orders massacres and shootings of unarmed peaceful Palestinian protestors, in broad daylight; photographed, reported on, televised. Hitler didn't advertise his death camps. The powerful, now, have become increasingly brazen. If monsters like Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and numerous well-connected others in countries around the world are never punished, but celebrated, even lauded, as George W. Bush is now--by comparison with Donald Trump--they get away with mass murder on a scale Hitler would've admired, as he would've appreciated news media compliance with mass murder committed right out in the open by nation states. As he would've appreciated the elevation of a torturer to head a powerful intelligence agency, without significant concern from the press.
Bringing politics into this discussion of Salò is appropriate, for his chosen historical period, 1943 to 1945, was a matter of choice on Pasolini's part. The setting could've been ancient Rome, or, had he lived much longer and made the film in 2010, Abu Ghraib Prison under the American occupation.
I couldn't, offhand, name a single actor or actress in the film, but their faces, especially those of the seven depraved motherfuckers in charge, may have become permanently etched in my memory. I intend to watch the film again. I want to understand its depiction of power as anarchy so that I can recognize it when it threatens my existence on a local level, and on the big stage of the world. This is the film's true and important significance, not its shock value.
Vic Neptune
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