Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom

Fans of extreme cinema, take note: Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) is probably the most repulsive movie you'll ever see. It's one thing to imagine human beings being forced to eat shit; quite another to see it acted out in a film. I can't say my gag reflex had ever been stimulated during the course of a film before, until Salo, a film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini...

As immediate as the disgust it provokes, Salo is distant emotionally-- a coldly abstract and didactic work. The film takes place in an expansive mansion in fascist Italy, where four fascist authorities and their gang of armed thugs and old whore accomplices humiliate, rape, torture, and kill fourteen adolescent victims, half of them female, the other half male. The authorities are dubbed the Duke, The President, The Bishop, and the Magistrate. The film basically unravels as a series of increasingly appalling forms of abuse. Pasolini denies personality and humanity to the victims and victimizers alike, so that the atrocities committed seem less consequential and more symbolic.

One of the themes the movie explores is the the desire of the morally depraved to infect the innocent and make the innocent complicit in their own degradation. Merely raping the adolescents does not suffice; the authoritarians first arouse them with horrifying, lurid stories of pedophilia and other sexual deviancy, and provoke them into having orgasms. The orgasm is a weapon the authoritarians use against their victims. As far as the pathology of sexual abuse goes, it's a fascinating insight, but via the fascist setting, Pasolini clearly has a larger target in mind: totalitarianism.

There isn't an orifice the authorities won't penetrate or an indignity they won't subject their victims to. It's a total form of sexual and physical subjugation, and the control wielded over their victims is also spiritual. The victims are cited for execution if they pray or speak out to God. And when one victim, early on, is cited for immediate execution, the authorities reveal it as a ruse, laughing at the greater pleasure they take in keeping him alive, for their repeated abuse far exceeds in cruelty murder, where at least there is peace possible in death. The message Pasolini seems to try to illustrate is the totality of fascism's abuses, that no boundary is sacred.

Pasolini stages the film gorgeously. The set design, performances, and camerawork are as pristine as the action depicted is revolting. Regardless of one's opinion of the film, Pasolini was in control of his craft, and the deliberateness and austerity impresses, even if it occasionally bores. For the discussions and thought it provokes and the quality of the filmmaking, Salo is a worthwhile film, and the Criterion Collection obviously agreed.