Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Salò," and the Fights for LGBT Marriage and Military Service

by Daniel Frontino Elash
Sat. 13 March 2010, NYC



I've begun rewatching the VERY HARD TO WATCH (fair warning!) Pasolini film Salò, or, 120 Days of Sodom, and I’ve been noticing some things in it. Here I would like to discuss what Pasolini as a gay intellectual and committed Communist might still have to say to us about the struggles for LGBT marriage and for LGBT inclusion in armed forces ‘service’ under a totalitarian system of consumerist-capitalism disguised as a 'tolerant' liberal-democratic one. But first, as is unavoidable when discussing this film, some background.

Based on the Marqius de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini in Salò updates the historical context of that work to the last days of fascism in Italy, i.e. the dual title. After the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 and the fall of Mussolini’s government in Rome, the fascists regrouped briefly around a rump government located at Salò, in northern Italy. Pasolini simultaneously adheres rather strictly to the actual structure of the de Sade book, which is comprised in parts of schematic notes because it was written in prison (not unlike so much of Gramsci’s work, mind you). Pasolini calls the respective sections of the film version ‘circles’ (girone) as in Dante’s “circles of Hell,” further tying French Enlightenment philosophical literature to Italian ‘high Catholic’ (if you will) philosophical literature, with his own synthetic analysis. Furthermore, Pasolini takes the opportunity to use all this as a basis to launch forth a devastating critique of Italian ‘neocapitalism,’ which is to say, the introduction of American-style consumerism in Italy after the war, particularly in the 1960s and ‘70s. (You can read more of his thoughts on that process in the translations at this blog, below-- but in a word, he called it "genocide").

The story itself is appalling, and the film, rather than sparing the viewer, plays a bunch of sly filmic tricks not only to gross the audience out, but also to make the viewer complicit in the action on the screen, much of which itself is voyeuristic. A stated goal of his was to make an ‘undigestible’ film, in part a response to the commercialization of his previous few films, the so-called Trilogy of Life('The Decameron', 'Canturbury Tales,' and '1001 Nights'), which he formally abjured in a piece I hope to post a translation of soon. That of course also gives an added kick to the anticonsumerist thrust of the piece (which is rendered even more hilarious in the context of all the screaming of ‘Mangia!’ done in the coprophagic scenes, etc). Pasolini’s rage and despair is in full view in this film, at the height of his formidable expressive and semiotic powers, and with less understanding of the work, one might find some relief mingled in with the rage and despair over Pasolini’s death that he never got far in a Trilogy of Death. (If memory serves, and for what it's worth, one of his next films was to be about Saint Paul in modern America.) However, this film particularly, and Pasolini’s thinking generally at the time of his murder, are as prescient as they are over-the-top, and with a better understanding of what he was trying to say and why, his murder can be considered nothing less than a direct counter-blow against humanity’s aspirations to be free from totalitarianism. Please, gentle reader, bear that in mind if you decide to brave an attempt to view this film, and by all means, turn it off if you have to. It is made to be effectively unendurable.

This is not all Pasolini’s fault-- the text he chose by which to say this thing, the one by de Sade, is in itself a scandal. de Sade, of course, was a cornerstone thinker of the French Enlightenment. Often perceived as a defender of aristocracy, because of his title and because of the absolute power and vicious tendencies (i.e. ‘sadism’) of his ‘protagonists,’ effective argument can nevertheless be made that de Sade was a founder of the general ideology upon which is based the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is to say, of a democratic republicanism whose powers are ‘checked and balanced’ by the rule of money. Sound familiar? Good. A nice summary of the debate may be found in the Peter Weiss play generally known as Marat/Sade, which you can find in both book and movie form. I suggest the film, it's a rollicking good time. Either way, definitely some critical insight there, to all this.

The gist of the story is that a small group of elite-ruler types procures a bunch of impoversihed adolescents, secures them in a remote location, and then collectively debauches, degrades, tortures, and ultimately kills them in a series of ‘sadistic’ orgies and other rituals ruled purely by the whims of the elite. This is a rich source of Pasolini’s semiotic work in Salò, because he class-consciously reassigns the roles to make clear who he thinks the various demographics are in his society and times, while stripping the story of none of the absolutism it was originally intended to advocate. Among other things, what that means is that the historical range and philosophical complexity of what Pasolini has attempted to, well, synthesize here, runs centuries in scope. He does it in two hours, in language enough of which most people can understand, on one level or another. No wonder he’s often considered one of the two or three most important thinkers Italy produced on the 20th century.

Anyway, on to some of my own observations on rewatching parts of this movie, which is to say, this is not a final or thorough analysis of any sort, just some notes, so, okay? Okay.

I find Salò remarkable for the uses to which Pasolini puts what we would now call ‘LGBT’ material. There is a lot of attention paid to gender and to gender transgression in this movie, and indeed much of that traces back not to Pasolini but to de Sade. For example, the positionality of gay males in the movie is invariably either as ruler, or as intended degradation of the victims (though, interestingly, not quite all the victims take it that way). de Sade’s agenda aside, one might readily wonder if that’s simple homophobia (which would have to be ‘internalized’ in Pasolini’s case, but he rather celebrated gayness all through his life and works, taking a lot of crap for it, so I think that would be a feeble argument), or else perhaps it's an expression of a phenomenon with us today, in which the ability to express homosexuality is in fact a privilege of the relatively well-off, one not enjoyed by most of the poor of the world, who are much more vulnerable to violence. Where de Sade saw pre-Darwinian justification of the rule of the ‘strong’ over the ‘weak,’ Pasolini instead seems to point to the class structure in which the modern LGBT-world, if you will, expresses its aspirations. The latter view would better fit with Pasolini's thoughts on the student uprisings of 1968, which were written earlier than when this film was made, and also I think point to the real gist of what Pasolini saw as the logical results of an LGBT movement modeling itself on the pursuit of 'consumer'-based rights in a society of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: it would become a means by which capitalist hegemony might be both extended and projected, and by which interests that might otherwise oppose the regime for its flagrant ‘crimes against humanity’ would instead orient people towards seeing their interests as laying upward in the social hierarchy-- to become collusive in the system of oppression, in exchange for gaining a slightly better position within it, with no real power to alter its course or consequences.

I think of that one young male victim in Salò who decided he rather liked the Duke sliming on him, as it were-- unlike the President's 'bride.' The Duke's boy wasn't all like 'eww,' ya might say, he was more like, 'oh, daddy!' Was this victim merely opportunistic? But there are moments when he seems to truly offer and appreciate the reciprocation of man-man affection. Given the victim’s class origins, is this simply his first chance to express his inner feelings, and it's so nice that he’s willing to endure the circles of hell around him to get it? In fact, all of the guards go along with functional bisexuality, but they are not just victims, they are also perpetrators. Yet I wonder about the pure-victim sissy boy who isn't so victimized, at least for a time. What else might he possibly have seen, where all of his cohort only saw horror visited upon themselves. This makes me think of all sorts of things, everything from the whole ‘daddy-son’ nature of much contemporary urban gay culture, in which older men look for the cutest young ‘twinks’ their money can buy, and newly-arrived, pretty, young gay men seek out a ‘daddy’ that can secure for them a relatively upper-class lifestyle in exchange for affection rather than work. Stonewall was indeed a riot, but that was a long time ago, and there haven't been so many since-- let alone to the same effect.

It also makes me think of the LGBT movement’s strategy of equality via the ‘opportunity’ to ‘serve’ in the U.S. military, particularly given the routine atrocities that have partially come to light and partially been suppressed from public view, in the course of the Iraq War. Just what is LGBT-world fighting for the ‘equality’ to participate in, as perpetrators and not just victims? And in exchange for what, a chance to have one’s continued existence tolerated by sadistic and absolute rulers, in the midst of their untrammeled criminal debauches? Hmm.

Along those lines, on reviewing the film, I was struck by how much use is made of marriage ceremonies. Obviously and again, some of this goes back to de Sade, who had very definite and contrarian ideas about marriage, but did not oppose the institution as such (see for example Philosophy in the Bedroom). Nor am I frankly sure how much of the permutations Pasolini exhibits are his versus de Sade’s ideas, but Pasolini's presentation of marriage is nevertheless rigorous. First, we have a nonconsensual wedding of a boy victim and a girl victim, which they are forced to begin to consummate for an audience, until the rulers intervene for their own ends. The state forcing and interrupting marriages for its own pleasures? Then, there’s the scene where the male rulers all show up in high drag, and another victim boy is forced into a nonconsensual wedding with one of the rulers, in which the male victim is dressed as the bride and the male perpetrator as the groom. The wedding ‘feast’ becomes an amazing, multi-layered critique of marriage and consumerism within a system of arbitrary and total power, and of course, the nature of the fetish involved at that banquet leaves little doubt what the auteur(s) thought the whole thing tasted and smelled like.

Again, what is the predictable outcome of a fight for state-sanctioned LGBT marriage, in the context of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Again, what is the nature of the table at which LGBT marriage would sit, and what depredations would it be willing to tolerate so long as it had a spot slightly above the atrocities? Marriage is particularly interesting for being undeniably and deeply a ritual of property transfer and holding. As a lifelong class-conscious radical and a partisan of the oppressed, I have to say that this time around, I was as struck by what Pasolini had to say with and about marriage, as I was last time I viewed Salò by what Pasolini had to say with and about the non-marriage, furtive, love-and-solidarity relationships people forged in order to attempt to survive their respective and collective ordeals. No doubt, I was prepared for that in part by the ‘gay marriage’ debate, and so was able to compare Pasolini’s two treatments of the ostensibly same relationship, with and without the sanction of the state representing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. One may well wonder whether the comparison was intentionally or unintentionally prescient, but have a look (if you can bear it) and there it is.

Obviously, more can be drawn from Salò and compared to how things are a few generations further into the consumer-capitalist dictatorship Pasolini characterized as ‘a ruin of ruins.’ But tonight, I think it will suffice for various of my purposes to think aloud about what the film has to say to us today regarding that to which the LGBT agenda in the USA has effectively been reduced: marriage and military service. I will surely have more to say on this film, either specifically or integrated into other material, as I delve further into Pasolini’s thinking with two mission-critical tools I didn’t have ten to twelve years ago, when I first started paying attention to him: a commitment to the Communist cause, and some kind of functional fluency in Italian.

Unhappy Youth [I giovanni infelici], by Pier Paolo Pasolini

One of the most mysterious themes of tragic Greek theater is the predestination of the children to pay for the guilt of their parents.

It doesn’t matter if the kids are good, innocent, pious-- if their parents are guilty, the children must be punished.

It’s the chorus-- a democratic chorus-- that is declared the depository of such truth, and it sets it forth without introducing it and without illustrating it, as if it seemed natural.

I confess that I always accepted this theme in Greek theater as something foreign to my knowledge, happening “somewhere else” and in “another time.” Not without a certain scholastic ingenuity, I always considered such themes as absurd and, in turn, ingenuous, “anthropologically” ingenuous.

But now the moment has arrived in my life in which I’ve had to admit to belonging inescapably to the generation of parents. Inescapably, because the children are not only born, they are not only grown up, but they have joined the age of reason and their destiny, therefore, begins to be uneludably that which it must be, rendering them adults.

[...]

I have something general, immense, obscure to rebuke the children for. Something that remains outside of the verbal, manifesting itself irrationally, in existence, in a “test of sentiments.” Now since I-- ideal father, historical father-- condemn the children, it’s natural that, consequently, I accepted, in some way the idea of their punishment.

For the first time in my life, it turns out thus to liberate in my conscience, by means of an intimate and personal mechanism, that terrible, abstract fatality of the Athenian chorus that reconfirms as natural the “punishment of the children.”

Only that the chorus, gifted with so much immemorial and profound wisdom, added that the children were punished for the “guilt of their parents.”

Well then, neither exists a moment to admit it, to accept, that is, personally such a guilt. If I condemn the children (because of a cessation of love for them) and therefore presume their punishment, I don’t have the least doubt that it is all my fault. In the father. [In quanto padre.] Insofar as I’m one of the parents. One of the parents that has turned out to be responsible, first of fascism, then of a clerico-fascist regime pretending to be democratic, and, in the end, have accepted the new power, the power of consumers, the last of the ruins, the ruin of ruins.

The guilt of the parents that the children must pay for is thus [that of] “fascism,” be it in its archaic forms or in its absolutely new forms-- new without possible equivalents in the past?

It is difficult for me to admit that the “guilt” might be this. Maybe also for private and subjective reasons. I, personally, have always been antifascist, and I have never accepted the new power which in reality Marx used to write about, prophetically, in the [Communist] Manifesto, believing he spoke of the capitalism of his time. It seems to me that there might be something conformistic and too logical-- that is, unhistorical-- to identify with this guilt.

[...]

So, the kids that we see around us are “punished” kids, “punished,” for one thing, by their unhappiness, and then, in the future, by who knows what, by which slaughters (this is our irrepressible feeling).

But they are children “punished” for our guilt, that is for the guilt of the parents. Is it fair? It was this, really, for a modern reader, the question, without an answer, of the dominant motive for Greek theater.

Well yes, it is fair. The modern reader has seen in fact an experience that renders it finally, and tragically, comprehensible in the affirmative-- that which used to seem so blindly irrational and cruel-- of the democratic chorus of ancient Athens: that is, that the children must pay for the guilt of their parents. In fact the children that aren’t freed of the guilt of the parents are unhappy, and there is no more decisive and imponderable sign of culpability than unhappiness. It would be too easy and, in a historical and political sense, immoral, if the children were to be exonerated [guistificati] of that which there is in them that’s ugly, repellent, inhuman-- from the fact that their parents have been mistaken. The hereditary negative paternity can half justify it, but for the other half they themselves are responsible. They are not innocent children. Sad and culpable, but so are the children. And it’s fair that they should also be punished for that half of the guilt they cannot otherwise free themselves from.

But the problem always remains of what might be in reality such “guilt” of the parents.

It’s this that substantially, in the end, matters here. It’s much more important than, having provoked such an atrocious condition for the children, and consequently such an atrocious punishment, it must be treated as a grave sin. Maybe the gravest sin committed by parents in all of human history. And these parents are us. Something that seems incredible to us.

As I have already emphasized, moreover, we must free ourselves of the idea that such guilt might be identified with fascism old and new, that is with effective capitalist power. The children that are being punished so cruelly by their mode of being (and in the future, certainly, by something more objective and more terrible), are also children of antifascists and communists.

Thus fascists and antifascists, bosses and revolutionaries, have a common guilt. We all do. As much as we all [tutti quanti noi], in fact, down to today, with subconscious racism, when we have spoken specifically of parents and children, have always intended to speak of bourgeois parents and children.

History is their history.

The people, according to us, have their own history apart, archaic, in which the children, simply, as anthropological study of ancient cultures has learned, reincarnate and repeat the parents.

Today, all that has changed: when we speak of parents and children, if for parents we continue always to mean bourgeois parents, for children we might mean bourgeois children or proletarian children. The apocalyptic picture that I have outlined above, of the kids, means [the] bourgeoisie and [the] people.

The two histories are thus united: and this is the first time that this has happened in the history of humanity.

Such unification has come about under the sign and by the will of consumer society, of “development.” It cannot be said that the antifascists in general and in particular the communists had really opposed themselves [si siano veramente opposti] to a similar unification, whose character is totalitarian-- even if its repressivity is not archaically police-based (and if it never resorts to a false permissiveness).

The guilt of the parents is not therefore the violence of power, fascism. It’s also this: first, the removal of conscience, on the part of we antifascists, of old fascism, the convenient self-liberation from our profound intimacy (Panella) with [fascism] (having considered the fascists “our cretin brothers,” as it’s put in a phrase by Sforza recorded by Fortini); second, and overall, the acceptance-- so much guiltier than it is incomprehensible-- of the degrading violence and of the true, immense genocides of the new fascism.

Why so much complicity with old fascism and why so much acceptance of the new fascism?

Because it is-- and here we are at the point-- a guiding idea sincerely or insincerely common to all, the idea that the worst bad thing in the world were poverty and that therefore the culture of the poor classes should be substituted with the culture of the dominant class.

In other words our parental guilt would consist in this: in the belief that history were not and may not be able to be other than bourgeois history.


by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Lettere luterane, 8th ed. (Trento: Einaudi, 2007 [1976]), 5-12.
Translation by Daniel Frontino Elash, February-March 2010, NYC.

The enduring explanatory powers of Pier Paolo Pasolini...

in the form of a translation, excerpted from

Apology (to “Il PCI ai giovanni!” [“Communist Party of Italy to the Young!”])
by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968
translation by Daniel Frontino Elash
from “Empirismo eretico” [Heretical Empiricism], 2 ed. (Rome: Garzanti, 1991 [1972]), 156-159.


...until and including my generation, the youth had before itself the bourgeoisie as an “object,” a “separate” world (separated from them, because, naturally, I speak of the excluded youth, excluded by trauma, and let’s take as a typical trauma that of 19-year-old Lenin who had seen his brother hanged by the forces of order.) We were able to watch the bourgeoisie, thus, objectively, from the outside (even if there were horrible implications to this, history, school, church, anguish); the way to watch the bourgeoisie objectively was offered to us, according to a typical scheme, from the gaze placed on it by that which wasn’t bourgeois: workers or peasants (by those that would therefore be called Third World). For this reason we, young intellectuals of twenty or thirty years ago (and, by class privilege, students) were able to be antibourgeois also outside of the bourgeoisie: by means of the view offered us by other social classes (revolutionary or rebellious as they may have been).

We have grown up, therefore, with the idea of revolutions (Russia ’17, China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam). Consequently we have made, from the traumatic hatred for the bourgeoisie, also a correct perspective in which to integrate our action, in a non-evasive future (at least partially, because we’re all a bit sentimental).

For a youth of today the thing is placed differently, for him [or her] it is much more difficult to watch the bourgeoisie objectively by means of the gaze of another social class. Because the bourgeoisie is winning, it is making the workers bourgeois, in part, and ex-colonial peasants in part. In sum, by means of neocapitalism, the bourgeoisie is becoming the human tradition. Those born in this entropy cannot in any way metaphysically get out of it. It’s finished. This is why I provoke the young: it is presumably the last generation that sees workers and peasants, the next generation will not see inside itself [anything] but bourgeois entropy.

Now I, personally... and publicly... am too traumatized by the bourgeoisie, and my hatred of it is by now pathological. I can hope neither for anything from it, nor that from it will come antibodies to itself (as happens in entropy. The antibodies that come from American entropy have life and reason to be only because in America there are the Blacks, who have for a young American the function that poor workers and peasants have had for our youth).

Given my “total” lack of faith in the bourgeoisie, I resist, therefore, the idea of civil war that, ideally given the student explosion, the bourgeoisie would fight against itself. Already the young of this generation are, I would say physically, much more bourgeois than us. Therefore? Do I not have the right to provoke them? What other mode is otherwise given me in relation to them, if not thus? ... To conclude, therefore, the students of today, belonging to a “totality”... are strictly unified and enclosed; they aren’t therefore in a position, I believe, to understand on their own that when they are defined as “petit-bourgeois” in their self-criticisms, they commit an error as elementary as it is unconscious; in fact, the petit-bourgeois of today no longer have peasant grandparents, but great-grandparents and maybe great-great-grandparents; they haven’t seen an anti-bourgeois revolutionary experience (of workers) pragmatically (and from that [come] the inane attempts at research on worker-comrades); it’s been experimentally tried, instead, the first type of quality of neocapitalist life, with its problems of total industrialization. The petit-bourgeoisie of today, therefore, is no longer that which was defined in the Marxist classics such as in Lenin. (Such as, for example, today’s China is no longer the China of Lenin, and therefore to cite the example of “China” from Lenin’s pamphlet on imperialism would be foolish.) Instead the youth of today (that might be hurried then to abandon the horribly classist denomination of students, and to become young intellectuals) don’t realize just how repellent were the petit-bourgeoisie of today; and that the workers might be conformed to such a model (despite the persistent optimism of the Communist canon), as might the poor peasants (despite their mythicization on the part of Marcusian and Fanonian intellectuals, including me, but ante litteram [ahead of one’s time]).

To such a Manichean conscience of the evil bourgeoisie the students can therefore add (to recapitulate):

a) reanalyzing - outside thus of sociology like the classics of Marxism - the petit-bourgeoisie that they (and we) are today.

b) abandoning their own ontological self-definition and “student” tautology and accepting simply to be “intellectuals.”

c) using the last possible choice - on the eve of the identification of bourgeois history as human history - in favor of that which is not bourgeois (what can they do anymore only substituting the force of reason for the traumatic personal and public reasons that I have hinted at, an extremely difficult operation, this, that implies a “genial” self-analysis of itself, outside of all conventions).