Contemporary Erotic Cinema by Keesey Douglas

Author:Keesey, Douglas [Keesey, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781842436462
Publisher: No Exit Press
Published: 2012-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) (1975)

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cast: Sergio Fascetti (Sergio), Renata Moar (Renata), Giorgio Cataldi (the bishop)

Near the end of World War Two, four Italian fascists sexually abuse, torture and kill a number of young men and women. In a way that suggests internalised homophobia, gay director Pier Paolo Pasolini has picked up some unfortunate elements from his source text, The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), written by the Marquis de Sade. As in Sade, the film associates homosexuality and anal intercourse with pain, shit and death. By contrast, heterosexuality is depicted as a positive alternative and linked to life-affirming pleasure and procreation. Following a marriage ceremony in which two of the young people, Sergio and Renata, exchange sacred vows, the fascists strip them of their wedding attire and order them down on the ground to copulate like animals. However, Sergio strokes Renata’s face with tenderness and she affectionately ruffles his hair. They kiss with the shyness of newlyweds and embrace with true feeling for each other, only then lying down and moving towards making love. But this is too much humanity for their cruel masters to countenance. The fascists separate the couple and, asserting the lord and master’s ‘right to the first night’ (‘This flower is reserved for us!’), they forcibly sodomise the newlyweds, taking pleasure in their pain, consolidating power through their punishment. Each fascist likes to think of himself as ‘tall and endowed with an enormous member. He is also extremely rich, very powerful, severe and cruel – with a heart of stone.’ It is as though having a ‘heart of stone’ gets him hard. His phallus is a weapon that, by inflicting pain, allows him to get off on his sense of power. The young men and women – ‘these innocent children’ – are there only to be defiled, empowering their perverse masters by allowing themselves to be reduced to ‘weak, chained creatures, destined for our pleasure’.

Does the film then become, like Sade’s text, a ‘brutally dehumanising kind of pornography that annihilates the human person, reducing it to a disposable pleasure machine’?100 Not quite. Consider the relationship between one of the fascists – a bishop – and an anonymous young man known only as a ‘fucker’ and chosen for the size of his cock. When the ‘fucker’ sodomises the bishop, this blasphemous act may seem typical of the ‘anal defilement’ often engaged in by the fascists, as when they buggered the newlyweds. One difference, though, is that here the fascist is on the receiving end; it is not he who is getting a hard-on from committing cruelty. More importantly, this is anal sex that does not appear to involve pain and that both men seem to enjoy. The young man smiles and pants in excitement as he rides the moaning bishop’s back, thrusting so vigorously that the two fall from the bed to the floor where, after some more energetic coupling, they orgasm. Following this,

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