It is this type of
accusation which has, most often, been levelled at Salo and it is
predicated on the belief that Pasolini was unable to transcend the scandalous
nature of his material and was ultimately to drown in a sensationalism
of his own making. Repeated viewings of Salo provide evidence which
would tend to contradict this notion and reveal, instead, the pains Pasolini
took to avoid falling into this trap. Pasolini employs a number of formal
strategies (discontinuity editing, intertextual citations and a series
of mathematically precise tableaux) which serve to denaturalise
the spectacle or dismantle the illusion and open up a mode of distanciation
for the spectator. Salo's Fascist libertines indulge in the
most extreme forms of sado-eroticism but these acts are, in themselves,
far from erotic.
Pasolini's formal
tactics may empty out the potential for romanticising evil or rendering
Fascism 'sexy' but in doing so they cannot avoid providing the latter with
a certain aesthetic. The turn to aesthetics, which took the form of privileging
art over the 'real' was for Pasolini an explicitly political gesture. It
became a means of preserving an idealised 'poetics' which stood in direct
opposition to the functionalism and rationality of bourgeois society. The
Fascists in Salo are, in many regards, grotesque or resolutely 'Other'
but at the same time, because they are aestheticised, they become objects
of 'perverse' fascination. However, for Walter Benjamin, this privileging
of the aesthetic, the doctrine of 'art for art's sake', was a very dangerous
notion as it was part of Fascism's ability to 'aesthecise politics '. This
interpretation of art involved "a number of outmoded concepts such as creativity
and genius, eternal value and mystery - concepts whose uncontrolled (and
at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing
of data in the Fascist sense".6
In any event, Pasolini's
aesthetics are bound up in Salo's patent sense of the artifical
or a self conscious
awareness of it's own constructiveness. Salo is permeated by
intertextual citations,
quotations and allusions: it is based on a novel by De Sade and informed
by a number of contemporary commentators on that writer (including Barthes)
who are credited in the film's opening titles. Salo is structured around
certain thematic movements which in De Sade's text were referred to as
'passions' or 'perversions' but which, borrowing from Dante's Inferno,
have now become infernal 'circles'. The implicit link between Fascism and
'decadence', which was mentioned above, emerges in Pasolini's use of quotations
from writers and poets belonging to the Symbolists, Hermetic or irrationalist
schools of thought: Baudelaire, Pound, Proust, and Nietzsche. This 'excess
of culture'7
serves to reinforce the notion of artifice and the sense that "Salo
is marked out as make believe, that it is not to be believed as an illusion
of reality and that it suffers a loss of fictional coherence as it attains
an artistic or intellectual one".8
Pasolini's Fascist libertines frequently 'quote' from the above writers
but such verbosity is a sham, decontextualised and emptied of recognisable
meaning. These quotations provide the libertines with a voice, of sorts,
but it is a mannered, absurdist speech, and alien in its logic. That this
'speech' should make no 'sense', that it is, for the most part 'nonsense',
is an indication of how Pasolini regarded the bourgeoise as demonstrably
'Other':
The bourgeoisie
seem unreal in Pasolini's work. He could not speak them or represent them.
They were literally unspeakable for him. When he thought of them he suffered
a bulimia of language, a physical revulsion. He wanted to vomit out the
bourgeoisie, expel them from his system. It was a way to cleanse himself
of their corruption.9
The irony present,
in all of this, is that Pasolini was, himself, bourgeois by 'birth and
education' and no amount of self purging could alter that fact.
Salo's 'evident
artifice' extends to the theatrical as the hermetic world of the villa
becomes a space
of performance. The storytellers employed by the libertines apply
make up, put on
costumes and narrate 'scandalous' tales of their own sexual exploits.
Their captive audience
is, invariably, arranged in a series of precise tableaux of
'arithmetical symmetry'
which echo De Sade's 'obsession with numbers'. These performances serve
to preface the 'three descending circles' (signalled by intertitles) of
obsession, shit, and blood.
Salo's descent
into the abyss is characterised by acts of castration, eye gouging, scalping,
and coprography. It is this litany of cruelty which threatens to overwhelm
Pasolini's distancing strategies and so traumatise the spectator that the
experience of watching Salo becomes, literally, 'unbearable'. Pasolini's
libertines systematically humliate, abuse and torture their young victims
. These atrocities are the result of a rationalising logic that seeks to
measure, codify or regulate passion and impose 'order on chaos'. This is
a world of excessive perversity but excess in Salo is joyless, mechanical,
and it carries no sense of celebration or emancipation. The peasant's young
bodies are penentrated and defiled: they become the locus of commodification
and reification. Salo is the embodiment of Pasolini's particular
nightmare in that it represents 'the death of sex'; the site of Thanatos'
triumph over Eros.
In Salo sex
is drained of all spontaneity and its potential to liberate or empower
is displaced; it becomes an act that exists in a vacuum. This is especially
true of sodomy which is, potentially, the most 'revolutionary' of sexual
acts in as much as it plays no part in the procreative process but, according
to Pasolini, it only results in one more 'dead end': "sodomy is the most
typical of erotic acts because it is the most useless. It is the one which
best sums up the the repetiveness of the act, precisely, because it is
the most mechanical".10
Salo's libertines
(a duke, a bishop, a magistrate and a banker) are representatives
of the Law of the
Father: they perpetuate the symbolic role of language and partake
in the bourgeois
world of history. The libertines perversity is the result of an excess
of
reason which is
manifested in the rigorous prescribing of rules and regulations. The Law
of the Father demands
conformity but in Salo even this is not enough and the children
still end up suffering.
From the libertines assertion that the bourgeoisie has no compunction about
killing its offspring (several of the captives are in fact the Fascist's
own progeny) to the recording of Pound's Canto #99, with its filial
appeals, Salo "is a world of miserable, rejected children and hating,
hateful fathers".11
Salo's children, the sixteen captives taken primarily from local
peasant households, are invariably represented as acquiescent or compliant.
Whether they are being sodomised, made to commit incest or, in a coprophagic
'last supper' literally made to eat shit, the children display little but
weary resignation. The one 'rebellious' act of spontaneous lovemaking ends
in death and is the catalyst for a series of betrayals and complicities.
One of the doomed male captives manages to make the Communist salute before
he is killed, but it is the only gesture of solidarity that the young can
muster. The captives, instead, turn on each other and several former 'victims'
complete the pattern of betrayal by becoming accomplices in the atrocities.
Salo's children wear the mark of corruption: the decadent old have
irrevocably tainted the innocent young.
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6 Benjamin, Walter,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, from Illuminations,
Pimlico (London 1999) p. 212.
7 Greene, p.
202.
8 Rohdie, p.
113.
9 ibid, p. 48.
10 Greene,
p. 205.
11 Rohdie,
p.81.
