In my life, with all the trashy movies I've watched and enjoyed, there is a short list of titles that truly impacted me on a gut level, shook me up, upset and disturbed me, and by doing so, changed my world view. These titles include, "Cannibal Holocaust," "Martyrs," and "A Serbian Film." But still, to this day, there is one movie that trumps them all - the single most disturbing, subversive thing I have ever seen:
Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo: Or, the 120 Days of Sodom"
Pasolini had completed work on a trio of films that would be dubbed his "Trilogy of Life." The films were based on works of classic literature, including "The Decameron," "The Canterbury Tales," and "Arabian Nights." The films all celebrated a primitive, earthy humanity, including unbridled depictions of innocent, joyous sexuality. Pasolini's aims were noble, and his films true works of art, but the overall message was lost on a public who couldn't see past all the bump and grind. Countless pale imitators quickly sprang up, artless attempts to cash in on what Pasolini had wrought. So disturbed and disappointed was Pasolini that he wrote a lengthy rejection of his trilogy of life - a rejection of the naive worldview they espoused that Pasolini could see was impossible, and set about work on a trilogy of death.
Only one movie in the death trilogy was ever completed. After completion of "Salo," but prior to its premiere, Pasolini was murdered by a young male prostitute in Rome - killed by being repeatedly run over by his own car. As a result, "Salo," already one of the most devastating, bleak, and abrasively pessimistic films ever created, took on an even greater sense of ominousness and horror. It is hard to imagine where further Pasolini could have gone in a trilogy of death after the excesses of "Salo," but the fact remains that it was never meant to be the artist's epitaph - his grand final gesture by which all his previous work would be forever judged (and contaminated). And yet, that's what it has become.
"Salo" is based on another classic work of literature, Marquis De Sade's infamous catalog of sexual atrocities, "The 120 Days of Sodom." It stands to reason that the work would have been considered unadaptable. Indeed, a literal adaptation would be illegal, a sort of elaborately staged child pornography snuff film. Pasolini took the basic setup, married it with Dante, and used it as a framework on which to lay his numerous attacks on the decaying cesspit of modern 20th-century Italian society as he saw it.
The story has been moved from 18th century France to WWII-era Italy. In the tiny republic of Salo, four unfathomably corrupt fascists - among them a duke, a bishop, a magistrate, and a president - systematically round up a group of sixteen teenagers (eight boys and eight girls) and retire to a palatial villa where they shut themselves off from society and engage in an epic orgy of excess, cruelty, perversion, and degradation. In the end, all of the innocents die horrible, graphic, gruesome deaths, and the monstrous fascists dance a little jig.
Along the way, the viewer is made complicit in all manner of nasty goings-on. Perhaps the film's most (rightfully) infamous, notorious segment involves the entire host of the villa arriving to dinner in their Sunday best and feasting on a meal of excrement (collected from the victims chamber pots). Of course, it was really chocolate - and by all accounts quite amazingly gourmet chocolate at that - and Pasolini was using the shit as a metaphor for the gluttony he saw in capitalist society (a reasonable, effective metaphor) - but the actual witnessing of it is something one will never forget.
Just as the victims sit placidly by and wait for horrible things to happen to them - horrible things they all, for the most part, endure with mere whimpers and cries - Pasolini turns the camera on the audience as if in condemnation. Not just in the world of the film do we sit idly by as atrocities consume the very existences of the victims, but in the world outside the film, as well. In the real, actual, flesh-and-blood world. The criticism is weighty - part of my reaction to the film always involves a heady dose of guilt (amongst many other things). In the film the victims, out of desperation, eventually begin to sell each other out in hopes of saving themselves. How many of us would do the same? In the world of the film, the four fascists are representative of God - ultimate authority and power - and does not God get us all in the end? So easily we sell out our fellow man for a few more microns of time on earth, only to have compromised our very humanity in the process.
Rarely has a film concerning the objectification, subjugation, and ultimate extermination of the human body carried such a bitter world view regarding life and humanity in general. Pasolini so utterly and thoroughly undermines viewer expectations of titillation ("you liked my last movies? Thought they were sexy? Like to look at naked bodies? Well try THIS on for size!") that the film could rightfully be categorized as anti-pornographic. It seeks not to create heat, or desire, in the minds of viewers based on the erotic potential of the human body. Rather it takes great pains to distance itself from what Pasolini apparently came to view as a mechanical act thoroughly destroyed by the exloitation and commodification placed on it by modern society.
Pasolini directing "Salo"
The subtext could go on and on. In many ways, what "Salo" gives viewers depends on what viewers bring to it. Pasolini famously includes a title card listing "further reading" for viewers interested in a greater understanding of Pasolini's inspirations and motivations while he was making the film. I've never sought those books out. I don't know if I WANT to try to get inside the mind of the person who could make a movie like "Salo." For me, the film is enough.
"Salo" has managed, over its existence, to not only be condemned as one of the most notorious, upsetting movies ever made, but to be considered a masterpiece of cinema. Indeed, its artistic merit is unimpeachable (even if they do all sit around and eat poo at one point), and therein lies its extreme power. "Salo" shares many traits with classic trash cinema, but Pasolini was a consummate artist with the power to deliver whatever message he chose in clear, uncompromised ways. Imagine Michaelangelo having painted a fresco in the Sistine Chapel depicting the corpses of disembowled babies being consumed by rabid dogs and you will have some idea of the power of Pasolini's "Salo."
I've never seen a movie (literally, never) that merely felt as haunted, evil, and doomed as "Salo." That's totally subjective, and I can't explain it any better, but there's a sticky sense of malice over every frame of Pasolini's final work that is hard to shake. Much of that is no doubt due to Pasolini's murder being forever linked somehow with the film's very existence. But whatever the reason, "Salo" is what it is, and stands in the jaded eyes of this life-long fan of trash cinema as the single most disturbing movie ever made. It is not horror in the sense that it makes you jump in your seat and laugh at yourself - it is horror that sinks into your bones and contaminates your soul. It is horror that, once seen, can never be unseen, and will lie within you for the rest of your life.
