Salo - Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975
There is an inexorable truth revealed about the core of human nature and the psyche inherent in witnessing the exposure or humiliation of another human being. That truth is simply that the idea of the "human psyche" is really a complex electrical argument in our brain that defines what we each consider to be our own sense of "self".
The idea of "self-awareness" has been heavily disciplined throughout almost every society in history to be more than just simply 'aware' of one's own individual material worth. Rather, the efforts devoted to our own self-interest have become inseparable from our rationale; they have grown nearly instinctual. Thus, it is that (ironic) commonality in the highly individual vanity we find so fundamental to humanity that allows the use of humiliation as a mode of critique of man's ingrained sense of self. When our malleable sense of "self" is forced to interpret someone else's loss of "self" as it is stripped away in front of our eyes, the worst of human fear, our fear of losing our own "self-importance", throws us into an existential limbo. This argument between forces causes our sense of "self" to be momentarily defined by the simple strengths of the two extremes and how each contrasts.
This is typically a critique reserved mostly for the arts and other various mediums of creative expression. The artist, having to constantly lay bare at the feet of their peers their deepest of emotions, their innermost turmoils, and often even the frailty of their fragile physical form, this would seem to qualify artists as the most fitting as an examiner of the self, being stripped of that sense of self, and alternately the impact on self encountered by those forcing disgrace on another human. If they accept, the artist has a privileged chance to criticize most effectively those institutions and ideals that perpetuate acts of cruelty and humiliation in our society.
This privilege is of course not devoid of any danger or risk. After all, another notion shared by modern man, is the almost instantaneous negative reaction to an artist's use of any graphic depictions of one person or a group of people being publicly defiled, tortured, or humiliated. Though this is subjective, generally using most forms of violence, exhibiting sexuality in all forms, or including any other vivid, gratuitous imagery in a work can discomfort or infuriate a public audience to the point of censorship, protest, and even violence. Sin, vice, or immorality layed out explicitly by the artist in a social critique is universally taught to be an invasive, unacceptable method of philosophical argument, contending that it cheapens its own assertion by relying on pure shock value.
Specifically in the realm of art, often times our learned initial objection to graphic elements rings true, primarily when an artist fails to fully develop a strong concept for a work's argument, or lacks the necessary expertise essential to executing that argument clearly. The work, without these factors, soon falters and therefore comes to use the crutch of hollow, graphic images in excess, in order to hold the work together.
However, when an artist is successful in the stripping bare of our inherent materiality, a highly skilled balance of the formal and technical structure of the work is needed to stand in contrast with a skilled control over utilizing graphic acts or elements to more wholly define the argument or critique, with a careful filtering
Within a puritanical state of civility, the medium of film is one of the most comprehensive ways of rendering visually the contradictions of these systems into a translatable thesis. Constructing a skilled portrait of humankind's most refined demeanor, wearing the cloak of virtuosity over a quieted closet lust, and obviously disguising the horrifying human compulsion towards violence with the thin veil of civility and control, plainly sets up these facades to be stripped, making the disparity between the two twice as impacting to witness, especially when skillfully captured on film.
Pasolini's Salo not only succeeds in fully exposing the victimized youth forced into shame and anguish depicted in his film, but the film also intentionally sheds the masquerade of refinement and the appearance of acculturation associated with the central, controlling party (baring both the male leaders of the Fascist regime, as well as the loose women accompanying them). This group of political officials is wielded by Pasolini as a capacious illustration of his hatred for the horrors and brutal crimes of the Fascist ideal as a whole.
Pasolini purposefully adorns the tyrants in the garb of the upper class. They wear smoking jackets, with top hats, fine suits, leather shoes and bow ties, even valuable and decadent ball gowns (and not just by the women mind you).
They all board, and coexist for the entire film inside of a large deserted estate, claimed by the fascist regime. There are massive, oak floored rooms, marble promenades, grandiose paintings, and a spotless great room with chairs for each man rowed like thrones. There is never a time in which any of these self-made kings or their harem are separated from their pageantry and posture. Even when they choose perform acts of torture and rape, acts so dirty and foul, they still wear the air of their gentrified society. This forces the viewer to identify the primary locus of the sickening evil they collectively exude, to be a purely internal force or nature, unable to hide even under their most shimmering baubles.
The fifteen boys and fifteen girls on the other hand, who are choked underneath the talons of these monstrous humans and their positions of power, undergo unspeakable atrocities. This power and atrocity are together what make this film a masterpiece in its critique of capitalism, total rule, and fascism. Pasolini exposes their atrocities in both his examination of the extreme corruption that comes with absolute power, and most candidly, the deep perversions so well masked in society that when set free by the limitless powers of violent law and total dictatorship, far exceed even the most solid viewer's tolerance and ability to easily endure a piece as graphic as this film.
Pasolini exhibits a masterful consciousness in structuring the work's four blocks to match the structure of his literary inspiration, The 120 days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. His prominent basis in literature and writing surprisingly gleams from under the grotesque dialogue, remaining poetic despite its central topics of the scatological, the depraved, the vulgar and the inhumane. His framing often sits wide and out, with high empty spaces similar to the scale and grace of architecture in a Rococo painting of a Basilica or perhaps a Salon. He lets you sit in the room nude with the rest of the slaves, also seating you in the thrones of the Duke and the other men, enacting a geographical sense of voyeurism.
Careful to remain heterogeneous, Pasolini also cuts from the wide shots to shots that come close in, (almost seeming claustrophobic), for the various times where we follow the groping and other individual travesties unabashedly performed on the slaves at any whim, in public, by the Fascist lords.
This same claustrophobia is what heightened the rancor I felt with each new scene showing one of the enslaved teens being taken into privacy. Watching the children being led off into rooms built off of the main "story" chamber, in order to relieve the men of whatever darkness in their loins broiled to the surface was what touted Pasolini's heavy message of total humiliation the strongest. All the kinds of aberration that man is actually capable of never stopped sounding off his hatred for the fascist regime like a towering gong, throughout the whole film.
I watched, as in various acts of fetishism, coprophagia (eating of feces), vulgarity, sadism, sexual disfigurement, gender bending, animalization, slavery, psychological manipulation, horrifying torture, and murder, Pasolini scarred the central message into me with the most extreme visuals I have ever forced myself to witness. As a viewer, I even felt physically brutalized by the actions of these satanic men, who murder their mothers, delight in eating excrement, and revel in being so vile and sexually parasitic. And yet, Pasolini is able to let me justify his unfeeling documentation of these atrocities, using to its limit the foundations of his cinematic structure, mise-en-scene, and quieted cinematographic style and movement.
I was ensnared, visually devouring the mutilation of those who were lost to the world, making me just as submissive to the sadomasochism of those villainous capitalists as that group of Italian teens became. This film accomplished a sort of artistic stigmata, (if you can believe it), in which the pain being projected forced onto one or many of the victims in the film sometimes would literally feel mirrored in your own body.
It is this that separates Pasolini's film from the crutch of shock value, or a failure in critique. Glory was absent from his agenda, unlike some other director with only the shock crutch holding their film aloft. Pasolini means to make the body into a commodity; a sheer veil that is disposable, not only in stripping his actors of their humanity, but in stripping the viewer as well. He wants to disrupt that inherent self-importance, and our instinctual sense of power as an individual, so that we understand that all that matters inside us is what is intangible. He defiles everyone and once they are bare, those who have been defiled, both the evil men and the victims, are nothing more than the spirit that drives them. I was humiliated after watching Salo, and I soon realized why Pasolini made this film. He made me humiliated so that I could understand what it was to feel humility.
