written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
screenplay collaboration by Sergio Citti
based on the novel Les 120 journées de Sodome by Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (1785) [uncredited]

Criterion #17.

I did not watch it. I will not be watching it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t engage with it and respond to it. Herewith, some words on why I will not watch Salò.

First a quick explanation of what the deal is with this movie, offered as a public service so that you don’t have to go investigating.

It is an adaptation of the “most notorious” work of the Marquis de Sade. I am no expert on the subject but my personal impression is that the Marquis de Sade was a more or less insane person whose circumstances (being born an aristocrat and living in revolutionary times) happened to allow his obsessive writings to be published, and whose obsession (taboo behavior, mostly a conflation of sex and torture) happened to provide convenient fodder for later philosophers, who found that “taking Sade seriously” was an expediently provocative stance. He’s now a household name because his psychosis and literary bent made him a useful point of reference to sane people, but that doesn’t mean his output is anything other than raving insanity.

His 120 Days of Sodom is the epitome of the “insane work” — it is basically a long list, rigorously organized and out of all proportion to any possible reader’s interest or attention, of every torturous depravity Monsieur de Sade could think of, in ascending order, up to (and well beyond) murder. The “story” is: four incredibly powerful and wealthy evil men organize a huge orgy of perversion in a castle, and this is how it goes… Sade’s writing principle seems to have been “think of the worst possible thing you can think of. Now top it.” When I described it to Adam, he said, “so it’s like The Aristocrats,” and that’s exactly right, down to the specifics. Everything The Aristocrats do in passing, Sade catalogues in ten different combinations. For him, it is important to distinguish between the case where the mother is raped while pooping on the dead body of the daughter, and the other way around. Or whatever.

As with The Aristocrats, these “flights” of “fancy” are not actually meaningful as anything other than an indulgence of the inward experience of the broken taboo. Which obviously can have a strong grip on people. (I am reminded of Maria Bamford’s bit about “unwanted thoughts” wherein she “kills her family and chops them into bits and then has sex with the bits and then eats the bits.”) But these are not symbols of other things and they are not artistic creations. They are just one madman’s compulsive dips into his inner vault of “complete awfulness.”

Here is my anecdote about The 120 Days of Sodom, and god help me that I even have one. One summer during college I stayed at school to do theater, for which on-campus housing was provided, all of us in the same little building. The atmosphere there was, as you might imagine, even more goofy and carefree than the ordinary dorm environment, which is saying something. One day a bunch of us were sitting in the common area and being exuberant, and someone noticed that an old library volume of the “works of Sade” was sitting out on one of the tables — how collegiate is that? — and picked it up and started looking for dirty passages to read aloud. Even in those pre-Wikipedian days, I somehow had heard that 120 Days of Sodom was supposed to be the dirtiest, most outrageous one, so I flipped through to find it for him. The guy took it out of my hands and read us a couple of Aristocrats-worthy scenarios, involving people being farted on while being poked with hot irons or something, and we laughed at the ridiculousness of it. Then he flipped forward a few pages… and suddenly sort of went quiet, and then put it down and said, “I’m not reading this anymore. That stuff’s not funny.” And that was the end of that.

Of course later I had to pick it up and see what he had just read! And yes, it wasn’t funny. The point is this: if you really and truly want to think of the worst thing you can think of, you will think of things too awful even for The Aristocrats, too awful even for laughing at their own overcooked absurdity. Too awful for you, but not for an actual torturer, and not for the actual Marquis de Sade.

So that brings us to this movie. Pasolini took Sade’s text, set the action in 1945 in the waning days of the Italian Fascist state (headquartered in the town of Salò), reduced the 120 days to about three, and then, well, filmed it, and apparently filmed it pretty well. The transposition to the fascist context and to the relative realism of film is intended to give the proceedings political and philosophical resonance. I imagine that it probably does.

The resulting film, as has been widely reported, is extremely extremely extremely unpleasant. I have read quite a few reviews and responses to this film, and not one of them fails to warn the prospective viewer that the film is perhaps the most disturbing ever made, is likely to induce actual vomiting, should absolutely not be viewed if the viewer is at all squeamish. In short, that the film is not just about horrors but that to watch it is itself a horror, a genuinely traumatic experience that will never be forgotten, and one that you may well regret.

Noted! Many people apparently find it difficult to actually take such advice. Not I. I believe that this advice has been offered with the sincere intent to help others, and I choose to benefit by it. I’m a person who frequently can’t fall asleep at night because I’m unable to prevent my mind from obsessively replaying mildly frightening imagery, over and over, until I am completely consumed by senseless terror. So I really can’t afford to let in the most poisonous imagery of all time.

Furthermore, though, even if I could trust my stomach and my mind to handle it, I have an ideological objection, one that goes to the heart of what movies are worth. I believe that this film was made in good faith; which is to say, not in contempt of its audience. Nor as a cheap exploitation wrapped in ideological hoo-hah. I think Pasolini meant what he said about it, and that his tongue was not particularly in cheek when he included a highbrow philosophical “recommended reading” list in the opening credits. I believe while he no doubt enjoyed being provocative, the impetus to make the film really did stem from a genuine horror at man’s inhumanity to man/fascism/political power/consumer culture/whatever — i.e. real social-philosophical issues. But there is no getting around the fact that the film is an expression of cold rage, and in my experience, rage is an illegitimate subject for expression. It devours communication and renders itself worthless.

When I was growing up, my father would sometimes become infuriated by something on the TV news — who knows what — and would say something along the lines of “people like that should be shot!” to which my mother would then object for the kids’ sake, i.e., “That’s a terrible thing to say. Nobody should be shot,” and my father would then generally agree, for the kids’ sake, “you’re right, I shouldn’t say that. Of course nobody should be shot” — unless he was really too angry to acknowledge it, in which case we’d have to take the retraction as implied. (Don’t worry, dad — and mom — we did.) The important thing is that my mother was right: since he obviously didn’t think anybody should really be shot, my father’s outbursts were utterly worthless as communication. They were symptoms of his anger that thus revealed his emotion to us, but they expressed nothing in themselves. They would have been better unsaid.

But I know the impulse. When I get really, really furious at someone, I have the reflexive desire to confront him, and if possible shock him, with the severity of my emotion — to force him to see what he has engendered through his unkindness. And then, after I have realized with acute frustration that in most cases, a truly unsympathetic person will be able to shrug off the fact of my pain, I want him to be aware of an equivalent pain that cannot be shrugged off. When some asshole would be cruel to me for no reason in middle school, my mind would go wildly searching for a way to get through to him how wrong that was, and upon reaching the impasse that it was impossible to get it through to him, I would become agitated with the sense that I was confronting a paradox, a thing that should not be.

Pain thinks it must be transferable, translatable — because otherwise how will I ever be rid of it? This is why aggrieved people want murderers to go to the electric chair, right? “You apparently can’t experience how awful the thing you did was for me, but I’ll bet no matter how callous you are, you think being zapped to death with electric current is just as awful for you, so that’s how we’re going to make ourselves known.”

So Sean Hannity, for whatever twisted reason, only smiles smarmily when he finds out how angry and upset he made me. Positively inhuman, right? But being shot – ha-HA, Mr. Hannity, I’ve got your number now!

The problem is, what do we do in our fantasy when it turns out that, say, “the abuse of power” doesn’t even experience pain upon being shot? What??? But I hate it so!!! Or that, say, “human cruelty” will keep on chattering away cheerily even after being forced to eat shit and then raped? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? Goddammit, there must be a reciprocal to my rage.

But just as you cannot divide by zero, there is no amount of atrocity you can put in a movie that will really sock it to the concept of atrocity. No matter how merciless a death my father dared imagined for the hateful people on TV, the only people hearing him were his own children. No matter how much shit-eating Pasolini puts in his movie, the only people seeing it are his audience, and once again, the real villain sneaks away smirking like Hannity. GODDAMMIT! Meanwhile we and the Criterion Collection end up sitting here having a really thoughtful conversation about art, which is ultimately beside the point.

I am skeptical of any work of art where the motivating sentiment seems to be the same as Charlton Heston shouting at the Statue of Liberty: “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Can you imagine how much eye-gouging and scalping and so forth he would have to put in his Salò to express that level of outrage? Too bad it’ll still only be apes seeing it.

It would be another thing if Salò were meant as a realist kick-in-the-imagination to pampered audiences. “Take a good look, pansies, because this is what goes on behind locked doors in torture chambers around the world.” Yes, that would be the “contempt of audience” form of bad faith I mentioned earlier, but it would at least serve a quasi-documentary sort of purpose — a call to action. But, though surely just about every horrible thing imaginable and more has actually happened to some poor soul somewhere (well, except for the kind of stuff that happens in the Saw movies), the reenacted atrocities in Salò are totally literary, a dreamlike pageant of ritual awfulness of no documentary value. For all the essays I’ve read about it, I haven’t seen a one that described it as a call to action. What action?

I don’t need a kick-in-the-imagination — please, please trust me on this one, art world! — but what I really don’t need is a manifestation of evil made vile so as to spite evil itself. What?

Pasolini apparently said his intent was to make an “indigestible” film. But such a film, like unwearable clothes or a pitcher with holes in it, is not a film per se but rather a piece of conceptual art, best displayed under glass at a museum, in a canister. By viewing it we err.

And if Pasolini would agree with me… well then, I pass the test! Hooray, I nailed it!

Funny Games is even more misbegotten and I promise never to watch that either. I resent having been made to even see the trailer while out in the world, innocently going to see a real movie. At least Salò is well tucked away in its lovely packaging, where only the willing will see it or even need to think about it.

The Criterion edition seems to be extremely well curated, with tons of bonus material that people say is fascinating. I seriously considered getting the second disc and just watching that, but then I thought better of it. All I ended up doing was watching the first 10 minutes or so on youtube, the pre-atrocity part where the victims are rounded up, about which one paragraph:

An obscure movie, a movie that you’ve only heard of around the fringes of things — something like this — part of the horror is always that when you see it, it’s not just some vague thing that you read about in some footnote somewhere, but is fully existent, and every moment recorded on it represents a moment that really occurred somewhere in space and time. Digging into the bottom of the basket of movies is like digging into the bottom of the basket of moments, and I get a sort of vertigo about the infinite nooks and crannies of time — this movie didn’t originate in obscurity, it originated in reality. This is the essence of the horror of the “snuff film” type — somewhere, at some point in time, this was, as much as I am now. Even just having watched the first few innocent minutes of this movie… it’s shocking how utterly existent it is. The sky in it is blue, the flesh is real, the images hiss with prosaic actuality. All that stuff I read about is going to happen in this space? Okay, I don’t need to see any more.

I don’t think I need to write any more either. I feel that I have honorably discharged my duty toward this Criterion Collection title without actually touching the disc.

So, without further ado: the track for your album. Main titles.

This deserves a little comment. I gather that nearly all of the music in Salò is borrowed and unattributed, but the esteemed Ennio Morricone is credited as music supervisor. This track seems to be his own very slight variant (to evade copyright?) on the standard These Foolish Things. Though some writers have investigated the thematic relation between the lyrics and the film, I think mostly this is just a straight romantic song and the point is that it’s a straight romantic song. Get it? Just like “We’ll Meet Again” at the end of Dr. Strangelove, this sardonically pleasant bourgeois smoothness has been put here out of pure, giddy fury.

It’s pretty darn catchy!