The Edge - Index
Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom
Gary Indiana
BFI Modern Classics, paperback, 95 pages
Review by Hassni Malik (2001)
Fascism is a disgusting thing. Disgusting in its mechanical brutality born out of an inability to feel empathy. The cold hearted aggression that pushes itself to increasing levels of violence in an attempt to bring about a formalized reality that is entirely predictable and therefore reassuringly controllable.
And so it is with Pasolini’s final, unflinchingly grotesque film. The film intended to disgust, just as its subject matter was disgusting. The Marquis de Sade’s meandering, verbose tale of every conceivable act of degrading cruelty was seen by Pasolini as a metaphor for fascism in Italy and the rise of capitalist consumerism. It’s odd how the banality of the fascist mind leads it to a pathological attention to intricate details – the mechanics of the senses rather than the senses themselves.
Pasolini's ferociously political film is deliberately cold, involving ‘non acting’, presenting the story as it should be – as a clinical and methodical ticking off of a list of acts. After all, that is how the minds of the perpetrators work. The victims sometimes have different names (if they have names at all) half way through the film, thus ensuring we do not recognize them as individuals but as an interchangeable mass of objects to be consumed. We see them as the fascists see them: as a blank canvas. The victims are devoured by degrading and infernal acts because they are viewed by the fascists as they view themselves – as parts of the same machine. Therefore they must follow their fate.
Contrast this with a corporate-friendly filmmaker like Spielberg (whose Jaws was released in the same year as
Salò, 1975), who would use sentiment and clawing ‘emotion’ to make us side with the victims from the off. Pasolini’s far more complex take lets us see us through the fascists’ eyes, seeing them not as men of free will (as the fascists perceive themselves) but as emotionally crippled men trapped within the limits of their minds. One wonders what Pasolini would have made of our Big Mac World where blind consumerism is a given, rather than a feared future.
As anyone who's read Gary Indiana's terrific collection of essays on aspects of American politics and culture,
Let It Bleed: Essays 1985-1995, will know, his politics are in sympathy with Pasolini’s. But far from canonizing Pasolini’s work, Indiana presents a personal view of the film, as someone who watched the film every night for 2 straight months in the 1970s. His eminently readable style presents the film with all its nonsensical flaws and disturbing imagery as an allegory for what Pasolini feared the world might turn into. Sadly, we’ve already arrived in that future.