The concept of politics has always been a problem; frequently, people imbue the discussion of political ideas with ideas, justifications, and feelings that are entirely and separately social, racial, religious, or sexual. The body politic is meant to be an exclusively intellectual function, but it unfortunately cannot exist without the more primal, unsophisticated bases that organize it. In the case of fascism, the organizational principles can scarcely be distinguished from perhaps the least thought-burdened of human pursuits: art, and the evocation of both beauty and terror. In the Mussollini’s Italy of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, fascistic control is grafted onto a lust so bottomless in its appetite that it would seem to not be satisfied until it swallowed itself entirely. Given the total authority that the nation’s fathers possessed in such a government, there existed no mechanism to prevent them from sating their most primal instinct: to create something beautiful and to subsequently destroy it.
The 120 Days of Sodom was written entirely while the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille; as such, only the first section is sketched out in full, while later ones are done in impressions, as he evidently meant to return to it later. Its exact time period is ambiguous, though it is clearly in a pre-revolutionary France, a time period that, similar to the Third Reich and ancient Egypt, produced awe-inspiring works of art and architecture at the price of countless deaths by starvation, brutality, and slavery. Transposed here to the final months before Mussollini’s end, four men of privilege and power, identified only as Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi), Magistrate (Umberto P. Quintavalle) and President (Aldo Valletti), coerce and abduct 18 teenage boys and girls (including their own daughters) and bring them to an isolated but lavish mansion in Salò, the site of some of the worst Italian atrocities of the war. Once there, with the accompaniment of a pianist and several prostitutes, the four men utilize their prisoners to construct a steadily deteriorating pageant of obscenity and humiliation. It begins as a prostitute details a past exploit in strict physical detail, and continues as they become aroused, and then find another task to which someone youthful, fragile and afraid might be set.
Aside from the time period, Pasolini’s biggest addition to the scenario is a strong component of homoeroticism, both on the part of the four noblemen and their wards; in the original text, the abuse was visited almost exclusively on girls by their male overseers. While heterosexual abuse is rampant here as well, Pasolini’s revision helps to disconnect the proceedings from normal sexuality and better link it to the fascist impulse: what’s attractive here isn’t the male or female body, but pure mastery of it, and the acquisition of all that it contains. Their vision of sexuality was perhaps best summed up with Humbert Humbert’s poisonous little word ‘nymphets’, to describe an ambiguous age at which sexuality is budding. Humbert’s love, like the pageantry of the four noblemen, is largely fantasy, and would be fractured if it were to be examined to the slightest degree, but these men had the power to have their fantasy go on forever. Statistically, it is unlikely that each of these four people would be both bisexual and deviated to pedophilia; their real attraction is to their projection of youth’s impermanence, and to their own expensive taste for it simply because it is rare.
But because their victims are so young, and the period at which they find themselves so brief, it only serves to follow that they should be the ones to destroy it. Should there have been any innocence to begin with, it is so thoroughly destroyed by the closing reel that even the memory of it seems a mocking insult. Perhaps worse than the mutilation, or the rape, or the forced consumption of feces is the sheer consistency of it, over such a great period of time. One of Pasolini’s master strokes is the huge number of story-telling sessions, all held in the same massive room and led by the same prostitute, who never seems to grow thin of past follies. Each time, it is framed amply, so that we may get full view of the noblemen, prisoners, and the guards who serve them; it is a bracing portrait of degeneracy, of repetition, of carnal abuse of the human spirit. In an almost too perfect embodiment of this spirit, the teenagers are stripped naked (indeed, they spend much of the film that way), and forced to bend down in a circle, while the four men judge whose posterior is most beautiful. The prize to the winner? Instant death.
Much has been argued, discussed, and enumerated over about Salò, but little has been made over its most obvious creative debt, being to Leni Reifenstahl, director of Triumph of the Will and more closely to Olympia. Even as those films are condemned for their positive portrayals of Nazism, they are widely admired for their generous photography of marches, rallies, and immense buildings that could only be ordered built by those in absolute power. Both are valuable historical documents, but are also monuments to unchecked fetishism, making unmistakable links between the aesthetic impressiveness of a massive swastika sculpture and a youthful, muscular male form. To its credit, Salò never makes that mistake. It does indeed draw parallels between aesthetic beauty and the physical form (aside from the four noble men, there is not an ugly face nor unattractive physique to be seen, and when they are wearing clothes, they tend to be beautifully ornate), but it is no less emphatic in its depiction of said beauty’s debasement and ultimate destruction (there’s a reason that one of these films is still used for recruitment by modern neo-Nazi organizations, and the other isn’t). If nothing is truly yours until you’ve broken it (as would seem to be the case here), the powers of Italy truly had a grasp unimaginable to a democratic society, and wielded it to its furthest point. And under this sort of fascism, there is no division between the state’s control of the streets and tollways and its control over your flesh and your desires for it.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Even for Criterion, they went all-out on the supplemental packaging for this film. As you may have guessed, this is a film that inspires a good number of divided reactions, so there are no less than six director reflections on the film, including ones from Catherine Breillat and Gary Indiana, and the essay “Pasolini and the Marquis de Sade” by Gabrielle Bachmann. On the disc itself, there are three documentaries; Salò: Yesterday and Today, which features interviews with Pasolini and others involved as well as footage of the film’s production, Fade To Black, a discussion of the film’s impact and notoriety, featuring Bernardo Bertolucci, and The End of Salò, about the film’s production. There is also a theatrical trailer and video interviews with production designer Dante Ferretti and film scholar Jean-Pierre Gorin.
"Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (The Criterion Collection)" is on sale October 4, 2011 and is not rated. Drama, Foreign, Horror. Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Starring Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti.
