I stared in oblique awe at the penetration, a decrepit pair of eyes peering through the cobble. I spent my last summer of college in the province of Brescia, specifically the town of Salo. I hiked the ridges of Spino before making my way up Pizzocolo when a storm had hit. As I looked for shelter with waterlogged shoes I came across a castle and approximately 15 reenactors, dressed as fascist soldiers running inside for shelter. I saw that in their haste they had not closed all of the doors to the castle and I rushed in where I promptly hid. Peering into the kitchen I saw a banquet's worth of produce and meats and as I peered behind me through a small hole in between crumbling foundations I saw the then governor of Salo, the Duke of Brescia, a local billionaire and what appeared to be a priest. Further away I saw what appeared to be 17 children and 8 or so women, 4 of which were traveling between the kitchen and the dining area fully in the nude. Speaking no Italian, and most definitely trespassing, I hid myself away and powered my phone off.
Salo is a film that exists both in chronotopic stasis and specifically within the chronotope that produced it. Pasolini’s reimagining of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 of Sodom vivisects its viewer. During its nearly 2 hour run time the film begs its viewer, with tears of blood, to stop watching; at every point Pasolini films the viewer peering from the walls unable to blink at the rape that they are about to witness.
One of the first scenes of Salo is of two of approximately 20 soldiers tearing a child, no older than 12, away from his mother’s arms. The mother begs the OVRA to let her keep her child as the viewer’s blood becomes anemic. “Sorry, we’re just obeying orders” haunting the viewer as they resuscitate. Salo is on the surface an antifascist film. Pasolini having lived the horrors of world war two himself and having been conscripted into the Italian military shows keen awareness of the threat of ongoing fascist violence 30 years after the end of the war paying for his art with his life releasing his film 3 weeks posthumously. More than its antifascist message, however, is a message about how fascism proliferates in the mind of its creators and staunchest defenders. The separation of the bourgeois perpetrators from their position in the superstructure continues Pasolini’s ongoing critique of the 60s “radical” movement reframing the ‘sexual liberation’ and “PSI” movements as misguided, antimarxist movements in the same vein as his framing of libertinage (Schalk). This separation has also been felt in the opposite direction as I begin my own ethnographic research into right wing groups, many individuals in this group chastising this concept of “Marx” while promulgating analysis that, stripped of its cherry picking, is a Marxist analysis. Many times while talking to members of rightist groups they have brought up a “deep state” composed of individuals who steal the product of labor from workers; this “deep state” that they speak of failing to comprise the fascist they support. Pasolini semms to argue that these two radically different forms of “failed Marxist analysis” are in fact cooperative. The Duke, a wealthy fascist with providence over local politics, singing “Bourgeois recoil not from slaughter though victim be son and daughter” and later arguing that “fascists are the only true anarchists.” Some critics may argue that the Duke is correct here; however, Pasolini continually frames the Duke as unable to relate to the class struggle and thus perverse due to his disconnection from his own wealth and status. Pasolini structurally condemns both of these movements under a Marxist analysis. Showing that the fascists only care for their own enjoyment and fiscal security shows that the capitalization on antiqueer, antiroma, antisemitic and antiblack sentiment is a sociolinguistic tactic to blind the white working class to those stealing their labor.
Like 120 days Salo is not necessarily a ‘finished’ film with credible speculation that a fascist contingent assassinated Pasolini. However, Salo takes in incredibly novel stance to de Sade’s original 120 days framing the viewer as an agent in the rape that takes place during the film and staunchly condemning the fascist violence that. However Salo takes an incredibly different stance to De Sade, as someone who was a part of Mussolini's military and saw both himself and young soldiers return to life in Italy without consequence; the film stands as a condemnation of himself, his countrymen and the viewer as opposed to Sade’s celebration of his libertinage. The condemnation of the viewer, a voyeur to the horrors of: statutory rape, murder and fascism in this context, is central to understanding the second, more obscured message of the film. This is perhaps the only disagreement that I have with one of my two theoretical sources on this work. I disagree with Owen Schalk’s view that the doing of sex in Salo is representative of neoliberal consumerism; instead I agree with May Leitz’ analysis that it is us the viewer who is as said previously condemned, and further examined, as proliferators of Neoliberalism and thus the rape seen in the film (Leitz and Schalk).
Salo is an argument of two types. One against fascism and the violence caused by fascists even into Italy’s present day and one against Neoliberalism as a front for fascist violence. In both settings Pasolini ensures that the viewer is framed as a collaborator. Pasolini’s use of wide angled “inside the wall” shots shows in some readings the unending and unstoppable force that is fascism but to another we the viewer can metatexutally push against this reading. Something all viewers, if they stomach the two hour affair, fail to do.
Such as “Abi” and apparently some previous editorial staff at Cinemania argue (under Why Salo Is Scary also under the quote used previously “We fascists are the only true anarchists). It is a digression but the argument that this line is scary because the Duke is above the law (what this writer believes is Pasolini’s attempt to condemn anarchism) and not specifically because the Duke is the law (a condemnation of the Duke’s understanding of Marx) is … peculiar.
a sentiment shared by most Black radicals in the US, most panafricanists, and practically every traditional Marxist and Anarchist.
This comes primarily from Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi a, then. 17 year old who had driven Pasolini’s car after his murder. From what I can gather at the initial trial Pelosi stated that Pasolini solicited Pelosi and the murder had been done in self defense. Pelosi later denied having murdered Pasolini, not that Pasolini had engaged in the solicitation of sex with a minor. A synopsis of the case can be found on Pasolini’s wikipedia however the claim I make, that the murder was not done by one person but by a fascist contingent, is accredited to multiple sources primarily the BBC at the time. Now it is more concretely believed that Pasolini was assassinated. The case was reopened many times but was closed due to a lack of evidence as per ANSA
Works Cited
Abi. “‘Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom’ Is the Most Disturbing Film of All Time.” Medium, March 30, 2022. https://medium.com/cinemania/sal%C3%B2-or-the-120-days-of-sodom-is-the-most-disturbing-film-of-all-time-dabf16e8664f.
Leitz, May. “Review of ‘Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom’ (1975),” February 2, 2017. https://letterboxd.com/nyxfears/film/salo-or-the-120-days-of-sodom/.
Schalk, Owen. “Disney, Salò, and Pasolini’s Inconsumable Art.” Monthly Review, November 29, 2021. https://monthlyreview.org/2021/11/01/disney-salo-and-pasolinis-inconsumable-art/.
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