Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom by Gary Indiana

Extracts from the bfi Modern Classic Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom by Gary Indiana

1

I was twenty-seven when I first saw Pasolini's Salò. I worked nights at the popcorn concession of the Westland Twins, a Laemmle theatre in Westwood specialising in foreign films of the 'mature romance' variety. A friend managed The Pico, an art cinema in the Fairfax District. It was autumn, 1977. I got off work at 10.30. I usually drove home to Los Angeles, stopping at The Pico, where Salò ran that season as a midnight movie. (Actually, I think it was an eleven o'clock midnight movie.) That's how I happened to see this film, or parts of it, almost every night for two months.

I have a terribly spotty memory. This has served me pretty well as a writer, since I have to fill the yawning gaps between what I truly remember with whatever my imagination suggests 'must have happened'. I remember that melancholy period of my life in time-stained flickers, a slide show of faces and landscapes across a paling light. I was twenty-seven, but I think of myself then as 'pre-conscious'. The world was just beginning to emerge as something separate from the muck of my private anxieties. I went to the movies all the time. I believed that the emotions projected in films and dramatised in popular songs were the same emotions I had. I felt tremendous nostalgia for a history I didn't possess, for loves I'd never experienced, for bitter lessons I'd never learned.

One of the few places where you could get a drink after a certain hour was a Silver Lake bar called The Headquarters, an S&M club where police impersonators in uniform mingled with dowdier slaves and masters in dog collars and trouserless chaps. (Leather had had its major effulgence much earlier in Los Angeles, celebrated in the classic fistfucking porno, LA Plays Itself, and in movies by Wakefield Poole. By the late 70s the hardcore raunch scene was more happening in New York and San Francisco.) There were also the One Way, The Detour, The Spike, a constellation of more conventional gay bars at the nether end of East Hollywood. The punk scene was in full mood swing. One of the only boutiques on now-famous Melrose Boulevard was a tiny storefront called Tokyo Rose, where you could buy pre-ripped T-shirts festooned with safety pins.

During the day, I worked at Legal Aid in Watts. A dispiriting job. I dealt with seriously damaged, desperately poor people who lived in rotting bungalows where rats routinely fell through crumbling ceilings into their breakfast cereal. I lived in a somewhat sinister apartment hotel on Wilshire (The Bryson, where Stephen Frears shot The Grifters many years later, simulating its mid-70s desuetude - when I lived there, Fred MacMurray was the silent partner in the building's ownership) full of insomniacs, drifters, madmen, a kind of Chelsea West: the night clerk was a preoperative transsexual named Stephanie.

It was a time of compulsive, almost mechanical sleeping around that felt good for a few moments here and there. I had two jobs, and about two hours at the end of the night to pick someone up in a bar. Whatever followed that took at least two more hours, depending on the drive time, so I suppose in that faraway autumn of 1977 I got an average of three hours sleep a night. That was my life, and Salò became for two months a logical part of it, another little patch of soft, crumbly alienation and waking dream.

5

Salò is one of those rare works of art that really achieves shock value. Aesthetic shock does have a salutary value, and it's always amusing to read the outpourings of some cultural wastebasket decrying an artist who deploys shock 'for the sake of shock', as if to qualify as a work of art, a work of art has to be something other than a work of art - a tutorial in cherished homilies, an affirmation of quotidian values, and so on. I don't think art has anything to do with morality and it shouldn't: I should be able to kill everybody I don't like in a novel and get away with it, rape a twelve-year-old and piss on my father's grave. It's not my job to tell anybody that these things are 'wrong'. It's my job to show that these things happen, period.

Certain works yank the rug from under the meticulously planted furniture of middle-class morality and the aesthetic torpor that decorates it. John Waters's Pink Flamingos, Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres fous, Georges Franju's Le Sang des Betês, Andy Warhol's Blue Movie, anything by Hershel Gordon Lewis, scattered moments in the films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas - well, you can make your own list of things that lifted the top of your head off. I'm not sure that anyone is obliged to 'like' works of art that fall into this category, or that 'liking' them is ever entirely the point, though critics, quite often, mistake the celebration of the ghastly as an 'indictment of contemporary malaise', etc. - in other words, they can only like something if it can be bent to reflect their own moral certainties.

One way that Salò differs from the unabashedly perverse epiphanies of the cinema of shock is in its pedantic moralism, which might have ruined it if the 'shock' part didn't so thoroughly overwhelm the moralism. There is something absurdly winning about Pasolini's explanation of the shit-eating in Salò as a commentary on processed foods, and the fact that Pasolini was being sincere when he said it. And if you think about it, his interpretation is essentially reasonable, though it's hardly the first thing a viewer thinks when watching a roomful of people gobbling their own turds.

14

Contrary to Sade's mathematical division of time and events, as Pasolini observed in an interview: 'At first I wanted to show three of the 120 days, but... it all flows together, and there are no clear division into days.' There is a degree of narrative seepage from one 'circle' to the next - from the circle of manias to the circle of shit to the circle of blood (though this seepage does happen, albeit differently, in Sade as well); events move forward in rough sync with their designated category, just as the crimes carried out only approximate those prescribed in the book of regulations; an explicit picturing of Sade's novel, or a part of it, would look like pornographic science fiction.

Salò eliminates a great deal of what makes The 120 Days the fantastic tale that it is. Sade enumerates sexual acts that are physically impossible, gives his protagonists organs that would properly belong to mules, and depicts tortures from which the victims miraculously recover in order to be tortured again. Salò condenses this mayhem to credible proportions, rendering Sade's decadent Salon as a sort of homicidal boarding school.

The film's point of view is problematised from the outset. The only protagonists with whom we might 'identify' are monstrosities, and the only 'look' that approximates that of the viewer is the occasional, inexpressive gaze of a child-victim caught in unexpected close-up. While the victims are utterly expendable, the outrages perpetrated on them are pedagogical. They will 'learn' abjection from their captors, who initiate them into the process of their own annihilation. However, it is also implied that ordinary fascism has already trained them in passivity and infantile obedience to authority. We view the film while imagining the victims' state of mind, at the same time we are denied access to it. We see that the libertines will do nothing that corresponds to any normative code of behaviour; that everything will end in massacre; that the narrative is a self-consuming artifact that begins at zero and ends at zero. We anticipate its cruelties, in a sense look forward to them, as to the satisfactory completion of a necessary rite. Salò engages voyeurism rather than empathy, and attempts to turn voyeurism back on itself with various distancing devices.

After the ritual of the forthcoming days is established, the film becomes a cycle of routines, performed nightly in the same proscenium. Signora Vaccari, in her private suite, consults her oval make-up mirror and adjusts her diaphanous off-the-shoulder dress. This garment, a gauzy and obtrusive double triangle of piled chiffon decorated with big flower-like appliqués of black acetate that stick out from it like poison quills, acquires its own visual personality over several scenes in which Vaccari moves about the Orgy Room in highly stylised, balletic swoops and swanning gestures. She tosses on a cape-like black boa, studies herself in the oval mirror on the wardrobe door (which, as it swings shut, reflects the other mirror), and then descends to the Orgy Room. The bright, bluish light of the staircase, reflected on the glistening surface of a long table in the centre of the hall arranged parallel to the left and right walls, echoes the design of the film's opening shot; the long shot used each time a courtesan descends at story hour renders the staircase as a kind of vaginal chute that delivers the grotesque. The Orgy Room's architecture, its burnished colours, geometric Art Deco sconces, globe chandeliers, 'conversation areas', symmetrical doors leading off to unknown parts of the villa, becomes an imprint, eventually so familiar that the shifting groups of bodies contained in it are shuffled like figments in a dream, their mutations scarcely perceived by the viewer. The long shots that predominate in these scenes produce frustration, a kind of 'anti-porno' fuzziness around the sexual acts - gropings, rubbings, etc. - that transpire during the narrations. The standard perspectival framing of the hall has a miniaturising effect on the people inside it.

On this first occasion the victims are clothed, in light-blue outfits resembling school uniforms. Some sit at the feet of the libertines, others on chairs at either side of them, flanked by the fuckers, whose enormous members are usually obvious from the way their pants are photographed. The guards are also present, and the 'wives', at the periphery of the action. Vaccari's stories recount her precocious corruption in childhood. She commences with the story of a teacher who taught her to masturbate him. Although Curval interrupts to fault Vaccari's first story for its lack of specific details, none of the courtesans' subsequent tales is any more closely descriptive than the first: they all suggest more or less arbitrary bits snipped out of the relevant sections in Sade, in keeping with the metonymic inclination of the movie. The punctum, in each case, is the sexual act at the heart of the story and its assumed effect on the audience within the film as well as the audience beyond the frame.

I must mention again an important difference between Sade and Pasolini: the prodigious excitements aroused by the (exhaustingly long-winded) stories in The 120 Days are given an almost pleasureless cast in Salò. The libertines experience arousal almost exclusively as a species of rage - and, curiously, at other times as an incitement to peculiarly coquettish ways of acting out. There is, of course, nothing tender or romantic in Sade; but there is, in everything, selfish pleasure. Pasolini's heroes appear to experience their own depravity as an unassuagable irritant, no less than their victims' experience of submission. This has to do with the stiff way that the actors have been directed, the stifling lack of exuberance in their 'evil'. But it owes something too to Pasolini's determination to implicate the viewer in this 'evil' while denying us the guilty pleasure of viewing it head-on.