Movie Review – Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Written by Sergio Citti
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

His body was nearly unrecognizable when it was found on a beach in Ostia, near the edges of Rome. Pier Paolo Pasolini had been savagely beaten and run over multiple times with his own car. Additionally, the director had his genitals crushed with a metal bar and had been doused in gasoline and set ablaze. He was 53 years old when his life was taken. He hadn’t started making movies until he was 35, having helped write dialogue for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. Fellini brought him back for the La Dolce Vita script. Before films, Pasolini was known as a poet & a painter, both finding a potent presence in his cinematic work. His murder appeared to have been part of an extortion attempt by the mafia, stealing reels of Salo and demanding large sums of money in return. There was certainly hate behind it, too.

There are four – The Duke, The Bishop, The Magistrate, and The President. Four institutional pillars of fascist Italy circa World War II. The secret police are dispatched to round up nine young men and nine young women to be brought to a manor home for the pleasure of these four. Armed guards ensure anyone who tries to make a run for it is killed. The young people are expected to do everything they are told, no matter how extreme or vile they may find it. Aging sex workers regale the four men and their captives with grotesque stories of sexual deviance, spending a lot of time in the scatological realm. These narratives charge up the men who proceed to rape their helpless victims. As the days roll on, the desires get worse and more extreme, leading to a day of violence and chaos. This is not how things should be, but it is how they are.

Based on 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade, Pasolini sought to display what fascism is through his intensely symbolic & poetic style of filmmaking. He set the film in a fictionalized but real version of Mussolini’s Italy. The director had been a youth during that period and had vivid memories of the sickening cruelty people did to each other. He also saw that post-war Italy wasn’t all that different. New names in the positions of power, but the way the common person was treated was still like a much-hated dog. The film gets rid of any personalizing features of its characters; they come to represent ideas & concepts, but it never makes the harrowing events on screen any easier.

The film is structured into three parts, modeled after Dante’s Inferno – The Circle of Manias, The Circle of Shit, and The Circle of Blood. Each section is marked by a defining story from one of the old prostitutes. These stories often take place when these women were literally little girls and involve old men forcing their sexual kinks on the children. The women talk with delight in the present about how important and formative these experiences were. They smile as they detail pissing on an old professor or watching a sweaty man delight in eating the child’s own shit. The purpose of these stories is a type of conditioning. The young people sit on the floor, stripped of their clothes, listening while the four men grope and fondle them, becoming aroused by the sickening specificity of the stories. They often grab a young person, drag them into another room, and assault them. The further we go, the less they will leave the room to do these things.

Some young people decide to become quislings, tattling on the others having late-night rendezvous, attempting to reclaim some of their humanity. In Salo, sex is turned into an act of dehumanization, yet we see two couples who, under the cover of night, seek to reverse this and return sex into the beautiful act it should be. Both of these couples are punished brutally. One couple of note is made up of an armed collaborator and the African maid of the house. Knowing he is about to die when caught, the man reveals his true nature, raising his fist as a sign that he is a communist. His body gets riddled with bullets as the four old men glare in disgust.

The most chilling thing about Salo is that it doesn’t end with the deaths of these young people. At least one or two are likely dead, but the final scenes are of their torture. We see a young woman getting scalped. A young man has steaming hot iron brands pressed into his bare flesh. Knives cut away at bodies and humanity. The old men take turns sitting in a chair on the second floor and watching the events in the courtyard through opera glasses. They are wearing nothing but bathrobes and underwear at this point, caught up in the twisted, sadistic frenzy. One person realizes the horror of her involvement and kills herself. Two fascist guards get bored, turn on the radio, and dance together. They chat about one man’s girl back home. The film ends.

It should come as no surprise that Salo was an extremely scandalous film even before it was released and was subsequently banned when it was. Since then, censorship in some places has loosened and the film has become available in its entirety. In 1994, an undercover policeman in Ohio rented the movie from a local queer bookstore and then arrested the owners under the charge of “pandering” – another term for “pimping.” Several figures in the film industry, including Martin Scorsese, spoke out to defend the business owners and the film. The case was dismissed; it seems more out of public scrutiny than the accusing parties realizing they were wrong.

This was Pasolini’s final film, and he went out on an extreme note. I chose this film to start this series on this date (5 November 2024) for a reason. This is election day in the United States, which has come after over a year of the Palestinian genocide being streamed across the internet and American leaders choosing to do worse than nothing, to actively continue arming the Israeli occupation. What we are seeing happen in Gaza is the Holocaust of our generation, and it is being received just as I suspected it might be. Most Americans simply don’t care and are focused on their personal comforts instead.

I was wondering recently how, if you were born into a society that was already fascist, it could be challenging to realize that. You would be taught that the mass slaughter of people who didn’t look like you and didn’t hold power in your society was just the cost of doing business. It would be continually emphasized that there was no other way to prosper than to, coincidentally, do what those who held institutional power wanted to do. Even if you were able to wake to the reality that you were part of a multi-generational system of exploitation, you might still decide to collaborate with the architects of Hell. They would promise to beat you slightly less than the others or only rape you once a week rather than daily. Your mind would have been so conditioned to immiseration that you would see this parody of a reprieve as “hope.”

Pasolini saw a society virtually unchanged. He was sickened by the mechanization of living that happened so quickly following the war’s end. Processed foods were a particular bane for him, which is reflected in the Circle of Shit portions of the film. An older, “wiser” spokesperson extols the virtues of shit-eating as a “normal, good” behavior. Then, the young people are forced to engage in the practice at a foul banquet, a cloche removed to reveal their collective waste gathered over the previous weeks. It’s easy to see why this is bad because it is so overt. We see news reports daily about e.coli infections at McDonald’s or so many supermarket recalls, but the way that information is presented dulls the fact that the foods we are offered are often slop that the wealthy & powerful won’t touch.

The shit is metaphorical, too. I look across the present political landscape and see so many shit-eaters with their mouths pressed firmly to the anus of power. They will rage & scream at any person trying to have a nuanced and meaningful conversation. Flecks of shit fly from their mouths as they spout the same hollow talking points over & over again. They use words in their native language but don’t really understand what they mean, having allowed propagandists to remake the language. Ask five random people what the words “communist,” “socialist,” “liberal,” and “fascist” mean, and you’ll likely get fifteen different definitions. That’s not an accident. That is the system working as designed.

I was an elementary school teacher for fourteen years and still work with kids. I was driven away from the profession because, in my community, COVID-19 had been politicized. My community was very much in the bag for reactionary conservative ideology. Thus, remote teaching would end in January 2021 as the pandemic hit one of its largest surges to come. I resigned and still have a lot of anger over the circumstances. It caused me to reflect on how & what I taught and realized that education in the States does nothing but serve the desires of empire. We fill children’s heads with abject lies about the history of the colonized land they were born on, we tell fables about fictionalized versions of real people like MLK Jr with the express intent of teaching conformity, and we don’t actually help these kids develop the skills they will need in the horrific world to come as we ravage the planet.

We are slaves. Not the same kind of enslaved people that were brought across the Atlantic on boats or Moses’s people toiling away for the Pharaoh. We are the slaves of the 21st century, trapped in a spiraling void of “choices” that don’t really allow us to choose anything of meaning. Capitalism has already been selected for us, and every other decision we are asked to make holds the equivalent risk of bowling with the guardrails up. Even Trump serves a purpose for the establishment. Look at how his presence has given cover for the Democratic Party to cozy up with a war criminal like Dick Cheney and his daughter (who voted over 90% in line with Trump), Liz. American politics is a farce, and we should start saying that out loud more often, at minimum. 

Pasolini was an ardent communist. He was extremely concerned about the underclass, for whom any interest in political action was conditioned out of them. His directorial debut, Accattone, which I will review next, focuses on people living on the bottom rungs of capitalist society. Pasolini began to see that the communist factions of Italy had been taken over by the privileged, people who were at heart more liberal and loyal to the institutions or caught up in petty infighting to realize that the poor masses were their only hope. Consumerism was the post-war tool that would break the proletariat. Pasolini and so many others of the era could see it, like Guy DeBord, who penned The Society of the Spectacle.

We jump to contemporary America and see all that playing out as clearly as day. Never in my life have I seen a society so all consumed with consumption. This process has distanced people from the origins of the goods they purchase. Automation seeks to remove humanity from the services provided, as well. The anti-immigrant rhetoric now championed by Democrats plays into this as well. We demonize refugees whose plight the United States is more often than not responsible for, yet have built an economy that lives or dies based on the refugee presence in the food and manufacturing industries. We have re-mystified the production process so that the laborers within it can be more effectively squeezed for labor until they die and are cast off. Loosening child labor protections is yet another weapon in this war.

No clear winner of the U.S. election will likely be known on the night of 5 November. Trump will declare himself the winner regardless. Harris winning wouldn’t fill me with any sort of joy, though. Both of these people are committed to capitalism, empire, and genocide. Their delivery mechanisms just come in different flavors and tones. I also care less and less about Americanism and more about humanism. One day, the U.S. will vanish from the maps. It was not that long ago that it wasn’t there at all. Every empire falls. This one will, too. What will remain will be human beings, and until we refocus on protecting each other’s inherent human dignity, we will continue to be naked, crawling on all fours, jumping up to eat the shit out of the hands of our masters.