Well, there are only a very few things to say, and we can only guess what Pasolini was after in depth. One thing to say is that Pasolini in making the viewer complicit with sexual crimes equally uncovers the truth that we have all (all, really?) thought of exercising or submitting to comparable (if less grotesque) sexual power plays. I will not go into detail, since between the explicitness of the film and your own conscience, all is plain. This is therefore an involved postmodern confessional, where Pasolini gets to be the priest, we as “watchers in public” can admit it in silence by remaining, while denying it out loud when its over. He’ll keep our secrets.
Another thing to say is that while Sade forced the enlightened mind of the 18th century to face the consequences of rational assessment of the human soul (fixated by sex and domination), without reference to super-natural efficiencies, which then became 19th century psychology, Pasolini forces the film-going public of the 20th century to face the consequences of reaching an advanced stage of auto-analysis, wherein our nightmares must be given to us from society, rather than the Devil. And that job, like the priest-confessor’s before it, is a difficult one.
Therefore we can see a progression from the honesty demanded by Christ (the sin “in your heart” requires truthfulness to purge), through the clumsy confessional, by way of the literary form hijacked by Sade, to the videographic media which shows us the truth about ourselves we refuse to find on our own, or our pastor’s, initiative. The most frightening thing to me is not the loss of free will implied by mechanism, but the loss of individuality called out by our inability to catch why a Pasolini would emerge to bless us in this way.
Well, nobody has responded to my comment, and perhaps nobody has read it.
But it occurs to me that several topics I alluded to were obscure enough to demand (of myself?) further intellectual grating.
The first claim I made, and to my surprise nobody bothered to deny, is that the horrors depicted in Salo are in fact mere magnifications of the psycho-sexual fantasy world humans are immersed in from puberty. It takes many layers and folds of culture to cover over the raw violence, pain and aggression, not to mention submission, that the sexual function entails. We might start therefore in looking at animal species and how they do it. In essence, our best guess is that most mammalian sex is highly driven but brief and painful to the participants. Where the animal drivenness comes from (is it pleasure, lust, or just hormonal?) evades us in the human-mammal evolutionary divide, greatly complicated by the relative increase in sexual pleasure response in both human sexes, and the transferrence of acute pain from the act of intercourse to the act of parthogenesis. These ethological considerations may be extended into what we know of primitive mating patterns which must form the substratum of our buried consciousness regarding sex, coalescing vague urges to rape and be raped (for both sexes, to insure fertilization), to dominate the woman (controlling fertilization opportunities), and an underlying association of blood and pain (representative of both the man’s potentially lethal fight to secure a woman, and the woman’s fight to birth a child). Such an analysis as this, or some variant of it, broadly substantiates (and also demystifies) the claim made above that Pasolini in Salo merely makes explicit many sorts of deep underlying urges we busily suppress every day of our active sexual maturity.
But let’s be clear, the above is at least a stab at making a scientific case, one based on the imbalance of hormonal chemicals circulating in the human body and aligning energy bursts in the human brain (somehow…). Any student of Darwin must steel herself against attributing value-laden schematics on top of the central driving force of biological evolution: sexual reproduction in all its messy details. What culture does is abiological. For instance, culture enables men and women to deny their hormones altogether and enter the celibate world of Catholic convents. Or, culture enables men to make themselves eunuchs (by cutting off their own genitals) to become priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. Or, women to prostitute themselves in temples devoted to Aphrodite, thus sacralizing and socializing the individual overflow of male sexuality while suppressing the domestic and maternal urge. These boundary cases simply underline the hormone-defeating capacity of culture – it’s unexpected anti-Darwinian capacity. By far the greatest social mechanism in this area is to cover up the pain, aggression and violence that naturally accompanies unculturated sex.
Therefore, to the last point, the one which, if any does, carries the weight of the argument. If culture has, successfully, prevented animal manifestations natural to the sexual process to emerge into public consciousness, has constricted rape to the confines of marriage, has lessened the deadly competition between males for mating rights, again by interposing the courtship and marriage ritual (or business deal), has attempted in every way to lessen the pain and gore, or the visible evidences of virginal intercourse or childbirth by studiously hiding the bloody sheets, it has not erased their vestigial subconscious manifestations. We still associate all these horrors with sexual urges under the covers. The point is that, frighteningly, we need a Pasolini, albeit a great artist, to tell us that, to exorcise those demons and catharticize the ugly impulses, for instance, by attributing them to mad fascists who have already been condemned to a sort of societal Hell anyway (as if a liberal power structure might be immune to such orgies!). In the long gone days of old-time religion we were individually responsible to give this psycho-sexual confession (to ourselves honestly, or to the priest-confessor under threat of Hell). Today, we must corporately have our gonads subjected to electro-shock therapy to get the point, as with Salo. Tomorrow we will have lost the distinction between ourselves, the cultural cover-up, and the underlying animal physicality of our existence, to the detriment of all three. We need some other cultural phenomenon to hold these pieces firmly in place, and if religion is banished, and cinemagraphics fails, just what might that be?
A word I used in the post above kept returning to my mind uninvited: parthogenesis. I realized I had committed a parapraxis. The word I intended was parturition. Parthenogenesis is virgin birth, as in Mother Mary. And the obvious emphasis my subconscious was placing on religion bears further exculpatory babbling.
Anyone who has sampled both Pasolini’s Gospel of Matthew and his Salo has to be impressed with the depth of his art. Is the one about religion and the other about sadism? That is too shallow. Pasolini is about the permutation of religious sensibilities in the modern age. And this is a topic no-one can lay hold of confidently. For instance, it is far easier in a forum like this to talk forthrightly about copulation than it would be, for an example, to talk about prayer.
Perhaps my entire commentary on Salo boils down to this: We have gone through a one-way door since the enlightenment. Even if we wanted to, if we devoutly wished it, the way back to a truly religious culture is closed, whether we retain its baggage or not. Meanwhile, the present stage is unbearable. We experience a living soul-death of ennui and meaninglessness. What would it look like to go forward, technology in hand (another thing we cannot shake off) and recreate a meaningful spirituality from the broken sherds of the human pot?
Salo is Pasolini’s most experimental posing of an intriguing question. In the old days, we were the sinners, and God the watcher. Cinema allows us to be God, and the sinners are merely actors, giving us virtual reality. God was all seeing, now we are all-seeing. God judged, but now we judge. Is there a future in which we move from auteur-mediated cinema to artificial intelligence narrated virtuality in which our past and its triumphs and horrors come under our close inspection, collectively? In such a world, the infinite psycho-spiritual energy of an ever-expanding human population (copulation, at work again) immerse themselves in the reconstructed lives of their imputed ancestors, in all their messy, boring, sexy details, clear back to the first biomolecular meteorite fallen from the primeval sky. Parthenogenesis: The childbirth of consciousness from virgin nothingness.
One final note to this series of contemplations over Salo. No reader should take this as some sort of elaborate intellectual excuse-making for Pasolini’s sado-masochistic exhibitionism. In religious terms, this movie clearly qualifies as pure evil. Viewer be warned. You may take this as a personal confession that (1) I have watched most of it, and (2) I sensed my own primal bestial urges well up, and my deep cultural psycho-sexual wiring start to fry. My thesis is that this is precisely the intended audience reaction. Further, I propose that Pasolini intended for the most intellectually rigorous readers to subject themselves to something like this extended self-confessional process leading to a powerful critique of our modern society and its moral fate. I have given the task my best here.
But this does not excuse Pasolini for responsibility to the rest of society for his ouvre. The movie is, I think, extraordinarily irresponsible. If a parent escorted her young children to the morgue to view dead bodies being dissected, in order to teach them biology, one might make a similar declaration of irresponsibility. It goes without saying here that auteurs are inherently irresponsible at some level; this one, this work, perhaps at every level. How dire a situation warrants such extravagant irresponsibility?
GARAGE DISCUSSION GROUP #1 (MAY 2009)--- Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom almost 3 years ago
Well, there are only a very few things to say, and we can only guess what Pasolini was after in depth. One thing to say is that Pasolini in making the viewer complicit with sexual crimes equally uncovers the truth that we have all (all, really?) thought of exercising or submitting to comparable (if less grotesque) sexual power plays. I will not go into detail, since between the explicitness of the film and your own conscience, all is plain. This is therefore an involved postmodern confessional, where Pasolini gets to be the priest, we as “watchers in public” can admit it in silence by remaining, while denying it out loud when its over. He’ll keep our secrets.
Another thing to say is that while Sade forced the enlightened mind of the 18th century to face the consequences of rational assessment of the human soul (fixated by sex and domination), without reference to super-natural efficiencies, which then became 19th century psychology, Pasolini forces the film-going public of the 20th century to face the consequences of reaching an advanced stage of auto-analysis, wherein our nightmares must be given to us from society, rather than the Devil. And that job, like the priest-confessor’s before it, is a difficult one.
Therefore we can see a progression from the honesty demanded by Christ (the sin “in your heart” requires truthfulness to purge), through the clumsy confessional, by way of the literary form hijacked by Sade, to the videographic media which shows us the truth about ourselves we refuse to find on our own, or our pastor’s, initiative. The most frightening thing to me is not the loss of free will implied by mechanism, but the loss of individuality called out by our inability to catch why a Pasolini would emerge to bless us in this way.
Go to Comment
GARAGE DISCUSSION GROUP #1 (MAY 2009)--- Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom over 2 years ago
Well, nobody has responded to my comment, and perhaps nobody has read it.
But it occurs to me that several topics I alluded to were obscure enough to demand (of myself?) further intellectual grating.
The first claim I made, and to my surprise nobody bothered to deny, is that the horrors depicted in Salo are in fact mere magnifications of the psycho-sexual fantasy world humans are immersed in from puberty. It takes many layers and folds of culture to cover over the raw violence, pain and aggression, not to mention submission, that the sexual function entails. We might start therefore in looking at animal species and how they do it. In essence, our best guess is that most mammalian sex is highly driven but brief and painful to the participants. Where the animal drivenness comes from (is it pleasure, lust, or just hormonal?) evades us in the human-mammal evolutionary divide, greatly complicated by the relative increase in sexual pleasure response in both human sexes, and the transferrence of acute pain from the act of intercourse to the act of parthogenesis. These ethological considerations may be extended into what we know of primitive mating patterns which must form the substratum of our buried consciousness regarding sex, coalescing vague urges to rape and be raped (for both sexes, to insure fertilization), to dominate the woman (controlling fertilization opportunities), and an underlying association of blood and pain (representative of both the man’s potentially lethal fight to secure a woman, and the woman’s fight to birth a child). Such an analysis as this, or some variant of it, broadly substantiates (and also demystifies) the claim made above that Pasolini in Salo merely makes explicit many sorts of deep underlying urges we busily suppress every day of our active sexual maturity.
But let’s be clear, the above is at least a stab at making a scientific case, one based on the imbalance of hormonal chemicals circulating in the human body and aligning energy bursts in the human brain (somehow…). Any student of Darwin must steel herself against attributing value-laden schematics on top of the central driving force of biological evolution: sexual reproduction in all its messy details. What culture does is abiological. For instance, culture enables men and women to deny their hormones altogether and enter the celibate world of Catholic convents. Or, culture enables men to make themselves eunuchs (by cutting off their own genitals) to become priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. Or, women to prostitute themselves in temples devoted to Aphrodite, thus sacralizing and socializing the individual overflow of male sexuality while suppressing the domestic and maternal urge. These boundary cases simply underline the hormone-defeating capacity of culture – it’s unexpected anti-Darwinian capacity. By far the greatest social mechanism in this area is to cover up the pain, aggression and violence that naturally accompanies unculturated sex.
Therefore, to the last point, the one which, if any does, carries the weight of the argument. If culture has, successfully, prevented animal manifestations natural to the sexual process to emerge into public consciousness, has constricted rape to the confines of marriage, has lessened the deadly competition between males for mating rights, again by interposing the courtship and marriage ritual (or business deal), has attempted in every way to lessen the pain and gore, or the visible evidences of virginal intercourse or childbirth by studiously hiding the bloody sheets, it has not erased their vestigial subconscious manifestations. We still associate all these horrors with sexual urges under the covers. The point is that, frighteningly, we need a Pasolini, albeit a great artist, to tell us that, to exorcise those demons and catharticize the ugly impulses, for instance, by attributing them to mad fascists who have already been condemned to a sort of societal Hell anyway (as if a liberal power structure might be immune to such orgies!). In the long gone days of old-time religion we were individually responsible to give this psycho-sexual confession (to ourselves honestly, or to the priest-confessor under threat of Hell). Today, we must corporately have our gonads subjected to electro-shock therapy to get the point, as with Salo. Tomorrow we will have lost the distinction between ourselves, the cultural cover-up, and the underlying animal physicality of our existence, to the detriment of all three. We need some other cultural phenomenon to hold these pieces firmly in place, and if religion is banished, and cinemagraphics fails, just what might that be?
Go to Comment
GARAGE DISCUSSION GROUP #1 (MAY 2009)--- Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom over 2 years ago
A word I used in the post above kept returning to my mind uninvited: parthogenesis. I realized I had committed a parapraxis. The word I intended was parturition. Parthenogenesis is virgin birth, as in Mother Mary. And the obvious emphasis my subconscious was placing on religion bears further exculpatory babbling.
Anyone who has sampled both Pasolini’s Gospel of Matthew and his Salo has to be impressed with the depth of his art. Is the one about religion and the other about sadism? That is too shallow. Pasolini is about the permutation of religious sensibilities in the modern age. And this is a topic no-one can lay hold of confidently. For instance, it is far easier in a forum like this to talk forthrightly about copulation than it would be, for an example, to talk about prayer.
Perhaps my entire commentary on Salo boils down to this: We have gone through a one-way door since the enlightenment. Even if we wanted to, if we devoutly wished it, the way back to a truly religious culture is closed, whether we retain its baggage or not. Meanwhile, the present stage is unbearable. We experience a living soul-death of ennui and meaninglessness. What would it look like to go forward, technology in hand (another thing we cannot shake off) and recreate a meaningful spirituality from the broken sherds of the human pot?
Salo is Pasolini’s most experimental posing of an intriguing question. In the old days, we were the sinners, and God the watcher. Cinema allows us to be God, and the sinners are merely actors, giving us virtual reality. God was all seeing, now we are all-seeing. God judged, but now we judge. Is there a future in which we move from auteur-mediated cinema to artificial intelligence narrated virtuality in which our past and its triumphs and horrors come under our close inspection, collectively? In such a world, the infinite psycho-spiritual energy of an ever-expanding human population (copulation, at work again) immerse themselves in the reconstructed lives of their imputed ancestors, in all their messy, boring, sexy details, clear back to the first biomolecular meteorite fallen from the primeval sky. Parthenogenesis: The childbirth of consciousness from virgin nothingness.
Go to Comment
GARAGE DISCUSSION GROUP #1 (MAY 2009)--- Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom over 2 years ago
One final note to this series of contemplations over Salo. No reader should take this as some sort of elaborate intellectual excuse-making for Pasolini’s sado-masochistic exhibitionism. In religious terms, this movie clearly qualifies as pure evil. Viewer be warned. You may take this as a personal confession that (1) I have watched most of it, and (2) I sensed my own primal bestial urges well up, and my deep cultural psycho-sexual wiring start to fry. My thesis is that this is precisely the intended audience reaction. Further, I propose that Pasolini intended for the most intellectually rigorous readers to subject themselves to something like this extended self-confessional process leading to a powerful critique of our modern society and its moral fate. I have given the task my best here.
But this does not excuse Pasolini for responsibility to the rest of society for his ouvre. The movie is, I think, extraordinarily irresponsible. If a parent escorted her young children to the morgue to view dead bodies being dissected, in order to teach them biology, one might make a similar declaration of irresponsibility. It goes without saying here that auteurs are inherently irresponsible at some level; this one, this work, perhaps at every level. How dire a situation warrants such extravagant irresponsibility?
Go to Comment