NOTE: I’ve been collecting DVDs, particularly those of the Criterion Collection, for many years now. I think my first one was The Seventh Seal. For a couple of years I took French Nouvelle Vague and then Kurosawa as my subject, but since I got all the obvious ones I started to buy what was recommended through reading, or what looked interesting. But life overtakes one and it’s been a while since I concentrated my efforts on watching movies and now I’ve quite a few I still have not seen but which sit in my big white DVD cabinet, all arranged in numerical order. For the next couple of weeks I’m going to try one a day and I begin with the unviewed title which comes numerically first in my collection: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

The reason I got this was that for several years it was the Golden Fleece of the collection—there were copies trading for serious money and an appreciable trade in bootlegs. Criterion lost the rights to this movie shortly after they produced it, and for a while the only available copy was the BFI’s version. I’ve never seen it in Ireland and for good reason: not only is it rare but it is acknowledged as one of the more extreme movies ever made. It’s interesting that the other Pasolini pictures I’ve seen—Canterbury Tales and The Gospel According to St. Matthew could not be further apart in tone, subject or execution: the former is a knockabout, lashed together piece of scatology; the latter is a revolutionary though spiritually powerful retelling of the life of Christ. Salò is, by all accounts, much more radical than either, blending the depravity of one with the political message of the other.  I’m apprehensive watching it because I know from notoriety that it features quite a lot of torture, culminating in an apparently-shocking sequence of coprophagia. I’m also apprehensive as roughly half the reviews I’ve seen tell me that this emperor has no clothes, that Salò is bad. The other half, however, tell me it’s a great piece of satire. So let’s watch.

(lights dim, popcorn is rustled, floor is sticky. Time passes. Lights go up).

My reaction to the film is that it’s a visually interesting and sometimes shocking satire. Whether through desensitization or the jaded attitude of someone who’s sat through the Saw franchise, there was nothing in it that made me retch or want to leave. The story, such as it is, is of a collection of young men and women who are kidnapped and ensconced in a big old house run by four men, identified as bishop, president, magistrate and duke. There the kids are subjected to a regime established by rules which seek to undermine any structure or established norm. They must not have heterosexual intercourse, pray, connect with each others or family members. They are to be regularly treated to stories told by glamourous, ageing prostitutes, many of which detail some quite abhorrent treatment of children. The four Masters take turns to abuse and rape their captives, all under the watchful eyes of the Guards, men not much younger than the victims. To be honest (and what would Pasolini make of this from a Catholic) the phases when the women were telling stories of their lives and the kids sat there not knowing what the fuck to think reminded me of a three-day retreat for secondary school kids. Not the raping, though. Not to my knowledge.

Visually, the film sits between Kubrick’s and Greenaway’s stunning tableaux. The shots are carefully manipulated in a very formal sense, whether to declare something of the dispassionate atmosphere by watching through binoculars, or the bare wooden table, an altar to the emptiness of the Great Hall’s subject matter. More distinctly, clever cutting removes the explicit, leaving it up to the viewer to imagine the close-ups Pasolini couldn’t dare. This adds greatly to the effect of the final ten minutes, where much of the torture is, as noted, seen close up through the opera glasses and binoculars of the Masters.

Perhaps because of its overtly political form, one can see at a relatively early stage what Pasolini’s up to—the strutures of state are erasing moral values and replacing them with a self-interested moveable feast of indulgence. Anything on which one can rely is raped—a telling scene is when two of the victims are ‘married’, only for all the guests to be groped by one Master, after which the bride and groom are sodomised by two others. That done, the fourth Master joins in, sodomising one of the rapists as he goes about his business. You get the idea. Even the master/victim dichotomy is removed at times; everyone gets buggered, everyone eats the shit. Tellingly, in the days of bank bailouts, this is a younger generation being sold down the river to pay for the indulgence and greed of the ruling generation.

It’s the replacement by Fascism of traditional values; it’s the Nuremberg mentality when one guard spits in a woman’s face in an early scene and another apologises for what they have to do, but they both still do it. (This last moment is one bookend of the film—the final shot is of two guards awkwardly dancing in an opulent room while the last of the kids are tortured outside a window). Instead of formative values the kids are given stories about the worst aspects of humanity and then fed shit. It has the desired effect: the victims begin to rat out each other’s transgressions in order to avoid the dreaded and unnamed punishments promised to those recorded in the President’s little black book.

The four Masters are unspeakably nasty—at some stages getting drunk and ranting about Nietzsche as if to justify their indulgences, at stages dressing in fancy gowns to mete out some more creative punishments. One of them ‘marries’ a boy, memorably sullying that estate by delivering a sloppy shit stained kiss on the forehead of his ‘bride’. Get it?

That may be the trouble with this film: it’s not very subtle. One may argue that there is no subtle way to depict eating shit, but if it’s a metaphor for being fed a worthless stream of dogma/entertainment then it’s not a very good one. DeSade, on whose 120 Days of Sodom this was modelled, systematically ran through society’s absurd structures as a teenage boy turns the crucifix on his wall upside down for a little while, but there are two major differences between that sort of thing and this. Firstly there are fewer ingrained dogmas in 1975, even in Catholic Italy, and the shocking stuff comes off as schlock, and a little cack-handed (if you’ll pardon the expression). Secondly, the trouble with depicting atrocity is that if it’s well done it comes off as sensational, wallowing in the degradation it’s warning us against. This is the problem Kubrick had with A Clockwork Orange’s balletic violence, and this dogs Salò too. This is a pre-YouTube generation’s Two Girls and a Cup.

Probably because of the last reason, and partly because I’m growing old, I felt myself a little embarrassed that the teenage actors in this film (who claim that there was a jovial atmosphere on the shoot) got exposed to these levels of degradation in service of Pasolini’s project. Far from feeling shock and outrage at the events depicted, I felt a little of the lost innocence of the actors. Funny, that. The message is fine and dandy; still applicable to today’s entertainment industry. Fellini’s Fred and Ginger, or several of Amodovar’s pictures point out such plasticity, though, without having the actors sit in a big tub of poo or pretend to piss in someone’s mouth. Pasolini was, in addition, taking on some big enemies (rumours surrounding his death months later suggest he touched nerves) so he deserves credit there. But there is a nasty exploitation of youth in Salò, some very rarified perversions brought to the fore in service of a message which didn’t need to be that exaggerated, really.