Interview with Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana, is the author of Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, in the bfi Publishing Modern Classics series. He was interviewed by Rob White by email on 23 August 2000.

RW: Salò was made in 1975, the year, as you point out in the book, of Jaws. Clearly cinema has moved on and in retrospect it's clear that Salò was a swansong of some kind. Does it seem dated to you now?

GI: Salò doesn't seem dated to me, probably because there weren't imitations of it, and a lot of what it shows is still upsetting to people. Also, the film is a period film, and elaborately stylised, so it doesn't date the way a contemporary drama, slice-of-life sort of film automatically dates as society evolves. As there isn't any realism in Salò its reality hasn't become superannuated. It's hard to endorse the idea that cinema has moved on. There isn't a single predominating tendency in cinema now. I would guess however that some of the tics of 60s and 70s auteur cinema like Pasolini's might annoy a contemporary audience: holding the camera a really long time on an extra's face, messing up sight lines, that sort of thing. I probably overstated the importance of Jaws in the book. I would guess that Star Wars had an even more baleful influence on things. Incidentally, I just saw a film called Deep Blue Sea that makes Jaws, intellectually speaking, look like The Age of Louis XIV.

RW: Pasolini's murder prevented him making films that might have qualified Salò, or revealed more fully its relationship to his earlier work. Is this a problem?

GI: The problem is only there in the sense that Pasolini's murder and this particular film were so readily linked, and eclipsed the rest of Pasolini's work, in a certain journalistic kind of discussion. Salò is a satire of consumer society and perfectly consistent with Pasolini's other films and his polemical writings. What he saw as an extreme spiritual crisis in modern society demanded this particular form, and these extremely unnerving images.

RW: The murder also had the effect of linking Salò to extreme gay sexual behaviour. But is Salò a gay film? Is it specifically tied to the mid-70s, the time of Mapplethorpe, Fassbinder, Foucault?

GI: Salò has a lot of homoerotic imagery and shows numerous homosexual acts - I'm not sure what a 'gay' film is, what I think of as a 'gay' film would be something by Almodovar, an intelligent person whose work doesn't interest me at all. Certainly you can find things in common between Pasolini, Mapplethorpe, Fassbinder, and Foucault, an exploration of subject matter considered 'extreme' by conventionally minded people, but if we speak of the 70s (and I dislike this kind of decade-ism, though like everyone I'm guilty of it), remember that everyone was testing the edges of acceptable content, in films as disparate as Caligula and The Eyes of Laura Mars. Some of that exploration reflected a deep questioning of normative sexual behavior and other values and some of it was strictly about fashion.

RW: The relationship of Salò to Italian fascism has been questioned, and it does seem like the link is made quite perfunctorily. To what extent do you see the film as relating to the historical phenomenon of fascism?

GI: What's depicted in the film is a situation of total control over certain individuals by other individuals. These controlling individuals represent the apparatus of the state: clergy, banking, etc. In Salò the model of totalitarianism has been given a kind of desublimated lubricity that's never found in totalitarian regimes, which are invariably puritanical. Yet the appeal of fascism is an erotic one, and Pasolini wanted to show this as an explicit thing, the power to control another person's body, to use it sexually while destroying it, to get sexual pleasure from another person's suffering. Salò tries to explain fascism as this physical expression of the will to power, and to lure the viewer into complicity by showing a lot of stunningly gorgeous, naked teenagers. So we become accomplices to this horror by virtue of our own desire to keep looking, to keep cruising these adorable kids.

RW: Opposition to the censorship of Salò has often concentrated on the extent to which the film makes us face up to fascism or to other, more contemporary abuses of power. Do you agree with this? And, in any case, does Salò need to be justified in this way?

GI: I think the censorship really is based on puritanical phobias rather than any conscious attempt to stifle a critique of fascism. Fascism is in the bloodstream of a certain kind of moralist, but the main thing is this silly idea that people shouldn't look at naked bodies, depictions of sex, etcetera, etecetera, because it's 'harmful', and behind that is the question, harmful to what? I don't think Salò, or any other film, should have to justify itself by having an agenda of social criticism. There is nothing wrong with pornography. I don't happen to even agree that it's harmful to children. Most censorship efforts today claim to be protecting children. If people cared about children, they would look into child labor at Nike factories in China, or the places in Mexico where Disney has its costumes fabricated by children earning thirty cents an hour.

RW: Your writing deals fairly unblinkingly with violence, including sexual violence, and yet is also full of social conscience of a kind (radical, leftwing, antimainstream) that Pasolini displayed too. Do you see any parallels?

GI: I couldn't possibly compare myself to Pasolini. I'm not anywhere near as prolific, I'm not the kind of artist who is all over the map, continually producing things. I rather envy the situation of artists and writers in Europe, where, if you're a novelist or a film-maker and write a play, the play gets published in a nice edition by a small press, in America you can forget about that. Very, very few American writers are treated as serious artists in the European manner, and the ones who are have been around for fifty years, queening it over the rest of us. Very few American writers ever get to see a uniform edition of their work, or have all their work in print. Publishers simply do not support writers on the basis of their literary worth, it's all about money, period. Even if your editors believe in what you do very strongly, they have a bottom line that they're more responsible to than they are to you.

I don't really think of my own work in terms of 'radical, leftwing, antimainstream', this is how other people characterise it. (I am also routinely accused of having a grotesque imagination, usually for describing things I find in the newspaper.) I think a certain way quite naturally and my sympathies have always been with the unfortunate, I have that in common with Pasolini. On the other hand, I would never resort to the kind of faux-naiveté you find in a lot of Pasolini's work, I could never carry that off and anyway I don't like it. And I think I have a much better sense of humour than he did, I'm not at all taken with Pasolini's 'bawdy' side: as I said in the book, it usually looks bogus. I admire Pasolini's humanity and I certainly would feel lucky to achieve in my life one-tenth of what he did, but I am, quite sincerely, allergic to the grandiosity of the artist-as-public-conscience as well as the artist-as-pop-star, these are roles that require a certain degree of self-delusion and a great deal of relentless self-promotion.

RW: You say in the book that writing it, and rewatching the film for it, made you change your mind about Salò. How, finally, would you assess it?

GI: Actually, I said that watching all of Pasolini's movies again after some years, I changed my opinion about some of them, but in fact Salò seemed very much the same as when I first saw it: if there were such a thing as an ugly jewel, or an ugly butterfly, that would be the way to describe it. It's one of the few films that really burns a hole in the medium, that you can't really categorise or reduce to a schematic; it's just a very weird and arresting picture, and somehow more like a great painting than a great movie, like Uccello's Profanation of the Host or Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. I think its analysis of consumer society has become an absolutely standard one, which is to say, one that many thinking people accept as valid, but if this analysis were present to us all the time, in the bald terms Pasolini presents it in, we would simply go mad and be unable to do anything about anything. So it reflects a spiritual and intellectual impasse that Pasolini might have found his way out of, had he lived; now that I think of it, it does catch the spirit of that particular time, the suffocation of the mid-70s, the dead utopian hopes, the pointless fucking around.

Gary Indiana has been described by the Guardian as "one of the most important chroniclers of the American psyche". "One reads Mr. Indiana's ... work with astonishment at his talent" (New York Times). Born in 1950 in New England he now lives in New York and Los Angeles. After two collections of short stories, Scar Tissue (1987) and White Trash Boulevard (1988), he published his first novel, Horse Crazy, in 1988, followed by Gone Tomorrow (1993), Rent Boy (1994) and a pair of books about 'true crimes', Resentment: A Comedy (1997), based on the trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999). From 1985 to 1988 he was Art Critic for the Village Voice, and a collection of his critical writing, Let It Bleed: Essays 1985-1995, was published in 1996. His play Roy Cohn/Jack Smith was filmed by Jill Godmillow in 1994. He has acted in more than 20 films and played The Voice of the Radio in Neil Bartlett's London production of Genet's Splendid's. He is currently working on a new novel, Depraved Indifference, due out next year. He will pay a rare visit to London to attend the BFI/ICA conference on Salo on 29 and 30 September.