Old Schools by McGlazer Ramsey;

Author:McGlazer, Ramsey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4. The Courtyard in Salò (1975). Shown through backward binoculars.

But there is, as I have indicated, another account according to which he has not only been forgiven many times over, but also recast as a prophet of current political or biopolitical realities. This second story is hagiographic, and it has been especially widely disseminated during the last two decades. Those who tell this story counter the late Pasolini’s detractors by noting that, if Salò is hard to see, so, too, is our world of bare life and resurgent sovereignty, marked by unabashed exploitation and the end of the citizen-subject’s autonomy.7 Indeed, Salò’s defenders have argued cogently and often compellingly for the film’s lasting relevance. They have also shown that Pasolini’s late work speaks to a range of urgent contemporary debates. Seldom, though, have these critics stayed with Salò’s images or tarried with the uncomfortable question of complicity. There is instead a rush to bypass, an effort to look through rather than at the film in these accounts, which frequently refer not to the film’s images but to what they signify.8 And they have been seen to signify everything from “the eclipse of desire” in the present to “current methods of biopower,” where the operative word in that last phrase is “current.”9 Salò, by this account, looks forward-looking, like our contemporary; made just over forty years ago, the film uncannily anticipates our politics and our predicaments today.

To be sure, critics who make arguments like these follow the lead of the allegorizing cover story that the director himself provided, as when he said that sex in the film was merely a “metaphor for power.”10 Indeed, Pasolini claimed repeatedly that he had sought, with Salò, to expose contemporary capitalist power at its purest, at its most “anarchic.”11 But if we take Pasolini at his word here—or rather if, forgetting that a metaphor asks to be read, we take him to mean that the film’s images are so many veils to strip away or to see through—then it becomes difficult to account for the film’s painstaking construction and even more for its insistent backwardness: its fascination with Fascism and its fixation on Sade; its staging of ritual tableaux and its retrograde interest in “sodomy.” This interest contrasts starkly with the liberated—and still celebrated—sexual exuberance of the director’s previous three films, the films in his Trilogy of Life. Some of the films that he made before the Trilogy, ranging from La rabbia (1963) to Teorema (1968), had in fact shown postwar capitalist power recognizably—that is, in images in which spectators might have recognized themselves. Salò is instead set in a past that, by most accounts, was never to be repeated, that was supposed to have been left behind. Surely it was therefore easy, from the first, for Salò’s spectators to regard the film as if it were not about them at all. Salò is, after all, most obviously about Fascist and Sadean power—that is, about forms of power whose apparent remoteness from the present

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