In the Flesh: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Here is the dream at the heart of fascism: a room where you can do anything. With violence physical, mental, and economic you push the world to its breaking point, shoving its constituent parts further and further away from one another until no unified structure remains. This absence is the space that you desire, the liminal threshold beyond which all actions are permitted and consequences do not exist. It must collapse eventually; its very nature demands its own destruction, but first comes a period of such profound moral and spiritual annihilation that the fabric of human connection itself catches fire and is reduced to slag. That’s Salò, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s nauseating masterwork in which eighteen Italian youths are abducted and taken to the countryside by four unnamed political leaders — a magistrate, a president, and two aristocrats — to be tortured and pressed into sexual slavery.

On a visual level Pasolini shoots Salò in tableaux similar to the Baroque painting-inspired work of his contemporary and frequent point of comparison Peter Greenaway, each image of bodies together and apart rich with tension and detail on a compositional level. There is a deeply Biblical sensibility to his framing, as though each shot were a frieze depicting anal rape with the same gravity as it did the beheading of John the Baptist. From a beginning rich in greens and browns and full of the wind rustling grass and trees, the film delves deeper and deeper into ever more artificial and lifeless settings within the great country house. White marble occludes the sky. Dull tile and yawning, cavernous rooms replace the earth and its greenery. In its final sequence the film is nearly all flesh-tone and dun as a spectacle of mass torture and execution unfolds in a sandy courtyard. The venal and the mythic are in constant conversation.

The script, especially in its narrative segments in which aging prostitutes recount their past exploits, draws heavily on the monotonous and impersonal tone of de Sade’s erotica. The mere fact of each transgressive act matters far more than its sensual particulars. Where genuine feeling emerges within the framework of the film’s predatory relationships, it serves only to drive individuals to suicide or else subsume an innocent into the bloody machinery of fascism. The looks of genuine desire between fascist potentate the Duke (Paolo Bonacelli) and his teenage victim Rino (Gaspare di Jenno) force the viewer to feel in concert with the film’s loathsome core cast and their prey, an experience which can only end in profound revulsion and the conviction that love and desire on their own are no more morally meaningful than excrement. It is the film’s sequences of coprophilia and forced coprophagy which most upset, not only by way of instinctive revulsion but because in a world without consequences or restrictions for the powerful, the supreme ambition of our masters is to make us eat our own shit.