While You Were Out|Salò: Or, the 120 Days of Sodom

Writing on the contingency of language, the late American philosopher Richard Rorty observes of the French Revolution, “What was glimpsed at the end of the eighteenth century was that anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”

In order to clarify his notion of redescription, Rorty suggests, “The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior, which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions.”

For philosophers such as Rorty, the Romantic poets, and contemporary intellects, the questions once answered by science, religion, and philosophy, could only be questions for the poet and art.

The Romantics —who Rorty finds of particular importance—argue that the poet’s task is to discover a new way to describe something in a manner that no one else has done, at expressing, “something which had long been yearning for expression.”

Just as the French Revolution allowed the French to realize that they could replace their social institutions and the vocabulary of their social institutions so quickly, the poets discovered that they could describe the previously indescribable and the not yet expressed.

Or, as Rorty argues, the poet, “says things like, ‘try thinking of it this way’—or more specifically, ‘try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions.”

Seen in this context, then, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial 1975 film “Salò: Or, 120 Days of Sodom” accomplishes just that, redescribing for viewers the horrors of Mussolini’s fascist Italy by asking us to “try thinking of it this way,” with a film that poses provocative questions for a country whose social institutions once gave way to fascism and collaboration with Hitler’s Nazi Germany .

In this way, the two texts that structure Pasolini’s film, Marquis de Sade’s equally notorious “120 days of Sodom” and Dante’s “Inferno” are of particular importance in the context of Rorty’s discussion on redescription.

For Pasolini —who was just as distinguished and respected an Italian poet and intellect as he was a filmmaker— using the sadism and brutality present in Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” and the themes present in Dante’s “Inferno” are his way of saying to viewers,  “try thinking of it this way.”

Early on, Pasolini offers us a recommended bibliography toward the end of the film’s opening credit sequence that includes philsophers and theorists such as Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Simon de Beauvoir, Pierre Klossowski, and Philippe Sollers, noting particularly that “Salò” cites specific passages from Barthes and Klossowski, in order that we might better understand his use cinema (and by extension  Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” and Dante’s “Inferno”) to “describe the previously indescribable” atrocities present in Italy’s extremist past and what Pasolini saw in the 1970s as Italy’s historical amnesia toward it.

The film begins with hints of Italy’s collaboration with Nazi Germany as four powerful fascists/libertines —the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President, the four main characters of Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom”—send for several collaborator young men to round up nine young men and nine young women, kidnapping them and hiding them in a villa in Northern Italy.

There, each day, four middle aged prostitutes (also collaborators and present in Sade’s original text) tell to the eighteen young man men and women, the collaborators, and the four fascists lengthy and explicit tales of earlier sexual encounters with various lovers who each enjoyed a particular sexual perversion (a word certainly called into question here), a fetish that the fascists then act upon their captors at random.

Here, those young men and women experience all manner of torture, sadism, humiliation, etc. at the hands of their captors as they descend further down Dante’s “Inferno” (the film is literally broken into segments similar to those found in the Inferno: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood, each segment growing in intensity and provocation).

As suggested by its reputation as one of the most controversial films ever made, “Salò” offers graphic depictions of the fascists’ brutality, their acts of sodomy, their acts of violence, the sexual degradation of their beautiful young captives (the film was banned in several countries and often censored).

But the images of sex here are not erotic; on the contrary, the film seems more than anything else to comment on the state’s extraordinary power over bodies, its ability to reduce those bodies to nothing but objects, “a thing” in Pasolini’s own words, showing us the logical consequences when the state exercises such power over our bodies.

It is that link between the sadism found in Sade’s earlier work and the experiences under Mussolini’s fascist Italy that Pasolini appears especially interested in, the images on screen as horrifying as anything any horror filmmaker has ever offered.

Those images merit interpretation not condemnation and censorship.

And, Pasolini was not quiet about his role as a “citizen poet,” as the New York Times’ Alberto Moravia described him in a review of his book, “Poems.”

“Artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support…works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new State.”

Shocking and uncomfortable, “Salò” is just as hard to forget as it is to watch at times, offering images that challenge us to consider their meaning—no matter how desperately we may want to look away.

A

The incestious wedding in Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's controversial "Salò: Or, the 120 days of Sodom."