I.
“…Genet has a severe conception of beauty. He cares little about the substance of the beautiful; only its form matters. ‘Beauty,’ he says, ‘is the perfection of organization.’ But the purpose of organization may be to terrify.” – Sartre in Saint Genet. (1)
After 30 years, Salò is still an unwatchable film. Pasolini was no patsy, he knew what he was doing; he takes aim and he shoots. Precisely, coldly. I won’t watch Salò at night anymore. The power of the night adds too much to the film’s unbearable climax. The effect is too debilitating. It can take hours to shake off. And this effect itself is enough to vindicate Pasolini’s “mythic-realist” method, a phrase which to some has seemed contradictory, self-negating. But if it is a contradiction, it’s one that Pasolini has quite consciously constructed and sewn into his work. I wonder if Roland Barthes wrestled with the peculiarity of this expression when he criticized Pasolini’s film for lending irreality to fascism, and reality to Sade. Pasolini’s mythic-realism seems to be predicated on the fact phenomena, whether personal, physical, or social, present themselves like the Roman god Janus, with two faces, joined but turned in contradictory directions. Thus, sadism can be seen as the trans-historical reality of which fascist regimes are only a series of historical instantiations. Conversely, fascism can be viewed as the mythic trans-historical reality of which acts of sadism are only particular manifestations. The (mythic?) Chinese painter who said that when he comes to paint a rock or tree, he must first walk around it and observe it from every side because when he draws its image on paper he has only one side in which to suggest all its sides, would have understood Pasolini’s method. For Pasolini, a filmstrip of unfolding images offers a single dimension in which he must represent the two-dimensional mythic-realist structure of the universe that he has postulated. And just as the Chinese painter’s representation of a rock or tree can never look like any one side of the object as it is a representation of the object’s totality, so too Pasolini’s Salò cannot look exactly like any specific case of historical fascism any more than it can look exactly like Sade’s Les Cent Vingt Journée de Sodome. And even so, (and despite his critical misgivings), Barthes himself noted, both at the beginning and end of his critique, the disturbing power of Salò.
Salò’s power as a film may well be unique, but whatever our evaluation, it rouses our critical curiosity: in what does it lie? Perhaps I should begin by pointing out where it does not lie. It does not lie in the film’s allegorical dimension, no matter how important this dimension was to Pasolini. We are not shaken to the depths by our awareness that Salò can function as a critique of Italian fascism in particular, and of political power in general. In fact, such an awareness only enables us to endure Salò more easily, to look through or beyond it to see something else. It enables us to side-step the full impact of its blow by, at least partially, substituting its unwatchability with clear thinkable objects. Or put succinctly: it enables us to replace Salò’s indigestibility with something quite digestible. So, to return to our question: in what does Salò’s power lie?
The most obvious, most common response, points to the nature of the Sadean material on which Salò is based. There is certainly justification for this. Sade warns his readers “prepare your heart and your mind for the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began…” (2) and proceeds to progress, with equal measures of parody and depravity, from the simplest acts of debauchery to the most inexpressively repulsive. Sade’s work can certainly compete with Salò in terms of evoking a profound sense of nausea. In Salò the sense of physical nausea and revulsion reaches its climax in the “Circle of Shit” when a silver tray of warm human feces is the main course at a wedding banquet. The sense of emotional nausea reaches its climax in the film’s final movement, the “Circle of Blood”. Here too Pasolini could be said to be tracing out Sade, but this would fail to grasp what Pasolini has done. The power of Salò to deeply disturb does not come simply from Sade, but from the formal structure that Pasolini creates by combining Dante with Sade.
This Dante-Sade combination again brings us face-to-face with the peculiar contradiction, the fusion of opposites that runs through so much of Pasolini’s work. We could even claim that Pasolini’s acute artistic sensitivity can be seen in the fact that he was able to perceive in Dante’s mythic-spiritual Inferno the mirror-image of Sade’s concrete sexual perversions. Thus, when the victims, having been gathered together at the château, are addressed by the four libertines and told, “insofar as the world is concerned, you are already dead…” (3) Pasolini is clearly being faithful to Sade’s text, and repeating the Duc’s words to the young boys and girls brought to the fortress-château of Silling on a mountain peak whose wooden bridge has been destroyed to cut them off from the world outside. Pasolini is also, however, carefully positioning this scene as a reference to Dante’s Inferno: an enclosed, artificially illuminated, dissociated realm, where the truths of social morality have become powerless. A sign over the entrance to Hell marks the absolute change that is about to take place: “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” (abandon all hope, you who enter).
Pasolini’s château, like Sade’s mountain fortress and Dante’s Hell, is the scene of an endless profusion of obsessions. The content of these obsessions is itself shocking, but their power to shock does not merely lie in their maniacal nature, but in their inverted nature: feces = food; urine = drink; abuse = a caress; brutality = gentleness; degradation = love; crimes = laws; death = a gift. What characterizes Salò’s inescapable horror, however, is the way the Pasolini positions this content and the sadistic behavioural logic of the libertines within an all-encompassing structure that combines Sade’s narrative intensification leading towards the climatic torture and murder of victims with Dante’s framework of a descent from circle to circle until we reach “the bottom of the universe”, (a phrase which Dante does not construct arbitrarily as the entire weight of the cosmos was thought to converge in the centre of the Earth where Hell was located).
With this combination Pasolini creates a formal structure of great simplicity and restraint which progresses like an unstoppable transcendental (even cosmic) mechanism towards the final horror. It is the rigorous precision of the logic emerging from Pasolini’s structure that produces Salò’s devastating effect. It combines the constant anticipation of further horror which characterizes Sade’s narrative, with the constant inescapability of a descent into worse nightmares that characterizes Dante’s. Each movement forward is an extreme shock – there is no foreseeing, no foreknowing, no digressions, only a vague, profoundly disturbing, implacable, inescapable foreboding, (of which the ‘black book’ is an almost comical symbol). Every ‘circle’ completes and points beyond itself to a worse level. The logic of the film’s structure expresses a demand for its completion, a ‘duty’ that the film, in truth to its own inverted morality, must fulfill.
This logic, or duty, is fulfilled in the last of Pasolini’s three circles, the “Circle of Blood”. In the context of Sade, the killing of the boys and girls expresses the sexual pleasure of killing. In the context of Dante, it expresses the spiritual pleasure of killing. Pasolini’s achievement is the way he has brought together the opposing tendencies of Sade and Dante. On the one hand, this scene represents the highest ascent of Salò’s Sadean crescendo and is clearly an expression of orgasmic climax. On the other, it represents “the bottom of the universe”, the lowest point of descent, the point of maximum gravezza (heaviness), and therefore the unbearable limit of maximum human suffering. The content of this scene is pure Sade, but the way in which it is rendered by Pasolini, with the victims yells of agony hermetically sealed in silence, reduces its horrors to a purely visual dimension that transforms them into a negatively-charged Dantean spiritual vision. Pasolini’s cinematic style is shown here at its most ascetic and its most baroque, at its most clinically distant and its most humanly intimate, in short, at its most powerful and most contradictory.
II.
“If you ask Chagall to explain his paintings, even today he will still reply: ‘I don’t understand them at all. They are not literature. They are merely a pictorial arrangement of images that obsess me…’” – Chagall to James Johnson Sweeney. (4)
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” – Jung in Aion. (5)
Again we are making our way along a seam where two contradictory meanings meet and continually pass back-and-forth into each other: mythic-real; Dante-Sade; increasing ascent-increasing descent; social values-inversion of values; sexual-spiritual; orgasmic pleasure-emotional suffering. However we attempt to deal with this contradictory relationship, this androgyny, we will, I think, be forced to recognize its central significance in any understanding of Pasolini and his work. In fact, I think this seam runs through Pasolini’s esse, that is, through his essence or being. I use the Latin word “esse” because it has a mirror-like symmetry that Pasolini might have appreciated, a symmetry that allows it to be read not only conventionally from left-to-right, but with equal ease as an inversion of convention from right-to-left.
In order not to misunderstand this complexity in Pasolini I will lean, as far as possible, on his own words to describe it. It is the central theme of Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio in which an angel and a devil create two Carlos who are “the same. /And in fact they are identical”, but in profile they appear “like Christ and Judas in the Giotto painting: they are so close that they look like two people who are about to kiss.” (6) Later he returns to describe this state as, “a division that is present in every aspect or moment – even in the most profound intimacy of the individual…” (7) Jung analyses a strikingly similar situation: “If we see the traditional figure of Christ as a parallel to the psychic manifestation of the self, then the Antichrist would correspond to the shadow of the self, namely the dark half of the human totality…” (8) Jung speaks of this inner antinomy as a ‘paradoxical unity’ without which consciousness lacks completion. According to Jung, this Christ-Antichrist relation involves a double movement which is in the nature of a pendulum which first swings to one side and then carries out a complementary movement in the opposite direction, and he gives his opinion that the progressive development of consciousness in an individual involves an increasing awareness of this relation and “its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites” (9). Dnartreb Llessur, who lives in New York, and met Pasolini there in the 60’s, told me something similar. “Pasolini”, he said, “has a mythic-real mirror. When his anti-Christ looks into this mirror, he sees his Christ. This doesn’t surprise him at all. He’d always suspected something of the sort. When his Christ looks into this mirror, he sees his Antichrist. This is a significant shock. Again, when his anti-Christ looks in the mirror he feels his bond with suffering humankind. And when his Christ looks there he feels himself bound by strange obsessive desires. Pasolini was always looking into this mirror, and depending on his point of view, it brought him great pleasure or suffering.”
This is as far as I wish to go in (wildly?) hypothesizing about the nature of the inner life that led Pasolini to construct works, in both film and literature, in which an identity of antinomies always seems to occupy such a central position. What interests me here is the possibility of using such ideas to throw light on the peculiar mixture of elements that Salò presents us with: a fascination with sexuality; an implied experience of personal suffering that such an authentic recreation of Dante’s Inferno suggests; a hatred of fascist control and oppression; an openness to the elementary, irrational, and the creative-destructive nature of uncensored unconscious imagery; a contempt for the social complacency of the bourgeoisie; and a well-known empathy with the poor. And for now I wish simply to use these ideas to throw light on the final scene of Salò.
This scene has always struck me as something of an enigma. As the ultimate moment in the film, it clearly occupies an important position – it’s like the final stone of a building that completes and brings to perfection its architectural structure. This enigma is generated by our awareness that the Dantean-Sadean structure from which Pasolini has fashioned his film has run itself out, has already reached its own point of completion and perfection in the penultimate scene. The significance of this ultimate scene then, lies not only in its position, but in the fact that its existence is due to neither Dante nor Sade, but solely to Pasolini. So why did he finish Salò with two guards waltzing together?
Gideon Bachmann suggested to me that a “plausible” meaning of this scene is that it conveys that “normal life was going on as usual, and that the things those boys had done were ‘normal’ to them, just part of what the world was all about.” The scene opens with one of the guards sitting by the radio. For a second or two we hear it playing an ominous-sounding choral piece – as though it where the last spiritual-murderous vibrations of the sadistically pleasurable slaughter that has just taken place. The guard leans over and changes the channel – a modern waltz begins to play – “Can you dance?” – “No” – “Come on, try” – the two guards begin to dance – “What’s the name of your girlfriend” – “Margherita” – the two continue dancing. The exchange couldn’t be more simple, more natural, more ordinary, or more bourgeois.
There is, however, a question we need to ask: why in a film in which all the music is diegetic, does Pasolini let us hear the same music in this final scene as he lets us hear playing over the opening credits? The effect is to join the end of the film to its beginning – to close a circle, to create a whole. From the viewpoint of Gideon Bachmann’s comment, this effect suggests that a current of ordinariness flows over and under and perhaps even through Salò’s other current of obsessions and excessive cruelty – the two currents always flowing together, always at the same time, like two very different pieces of music playing simultaneously on the radio even though the guards can only tune into them alternately. And what catches my attention here is the reappearance of Janus, of a divided unity, of an androgyny, of a mythic-real, of an inseparability in Pasolini of contraries, of a god-devil and a Christ-Antichrist. It does seem that the dancing of these two male guards encircles the entire film, encircles in fact every other structure that Pasolini makes use of in Salò. And their twoness, bound together in a constantly interchanging oneness, ‘dancing’ if you want, is also “a division that is present in every aspect or moment” of the film, whether we are looking at the significance of its twin-title, its political-sexual allegory, its thematic inversion of values, its Dantean-Sadean structure, or the enigma of its final scene.
Endnotes
(1) p.98, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Heinemann, 1988)
(2) p.253, Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (UK: Arrow, 1990)
(3) p.251, ibid.
(4) p.26, Jean Cassou, Chagall, trans. Alisa Jaffa (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965)
(5) p.43, C.G. Jung Aion, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974)
(6) p.9, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, trans. Ann Goldstein (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997)
(7) p.21, ibid.
(8) p.42, C.G. Jung Aion, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974)
(9) p.44, ibid.
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