Saló: The Semiotics of Death, By Jesse Merlin ©1997

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In November of 1975 the revolutionary filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally beaten to death at Ostia, near Rome. His body was horribly disfigured, crushed by his own car. Three weeks prior to his death, Pasolini had completed editing what was to be his last film: Saló: The 120 Days of Sodom. Saló became his final contribution to the world, shattering all previous notions of the perpetually controversial nature of his artistry and ideology. Through Saló, Pasolini created his own semiotics of image-signs to represent his "theorem of death". According to Pasolini, sadism, through fascism, culminates in neo-capitalism.

Saló is an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's epic novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, which was completed while de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille; it is a tale unparalleled in its vivid description of lubricious and perverse debauchery. The 120 Days of Sodom was lost in the storming of the Bastille, and remained unpublished until 1935. To this day, it remains a highly controversial text and has been censored from many libraries. Similarly, Saló remains illegal in many states and, until recently, was not available for video rental in the U.S. Pasolini takes de Sade's tale of eighteenth century depravity and sets it in the fascist Italy of 1943-1944, known as the "Republic of Saló."

The film opens pleasantly, with the credits played over nightclub dancing music of the forties; first shots are lush and quasi-neorealist in their depiction of a villa by the sea. The film, however, takes on a markedly dark character rather quickly. We are introduced to the four fascist libertines who will dictate the story: a duke, a magistrate, a banker, and a bishop. Under their orders, fascist henchmen and soldiers round up young men between the ages of fourteen and nineteen for a seemingly unknown reason. Some men are drafted to be soldiers, but most are assembled in halls where the libertines "inspect" them; they discuss the young men, command some to undress, and write the names of the boys they desire on slips of paper to be counted democratically. Pasolini draws in the class struggle where the Marquis de Sade had none; in de Sade's novel, the youths are only of the highest breeding, whereas in Saló, they are mostly proletarians. This is a key choice in Pasolini’s semiotic development. A similar process ensues with young women, and the libertines, aided by aging madames, manage to select boys and girls for their nefarious purposes. The madames are very much akin to middlemen or solicitors when they sell the young women as slaves; the spectre of neo-capitalism is making itself more apparent. The entourage- four libertines, four madames, eight guards, nine boys, and nine girls- is driven to a majestic estate secluded in the mountains. Once assembled in the villa, the victims are read the formal code of sexual perversions and rules that will govern the rest of their miserable days. The film then focuses on the metaphorical descent of these unfortunate youngsters into the screaming agonies of hell at the hands of the libertines.

In structuring Saló, Pasolini utilizes the circles of hell as elaborated in Dante's Inferno. The film thus far has been entitled "ANTINFERNO," or the antechamber of hell. As they enter the villa, the "circle of obsessions" or manias begins. This circle is dominated by the detailed recounting of perverse sexual encounters, interspersed with violent episodes of sexual deviation and domination committed by the libertines upon the young boys and girls. Next is the "circle of shit," dominated by images of coprophagy. The film culminates in the "circle of blood," dominated by images of torture and death. Each of the circles is introduced by an elegant madame who has spent her life servicing the most base desires of libertinage.

Each woman spins lewd yarns relating to her circle, which are designed to excite the libertines and provoke similar action. The idea of reproducing the acts told in the stories is key; Pasolini's film is a tale of frustrated desire, of impotence taking its vengeance on a helpless underclass. The libertines' sexual voracity requires the constant exploration of the most grotesque and imaginative eroticism; the telling of stories adds fuel to their fire. Throughout the stories, a fourth woman is always present playing the piano. She begins by playing tunes from "Showboat," progresses through Romantic composers like Chopin, and by the end plays atonal and unsettling experimental music in the vein of Scriabin or Hindemith. This musical progression is structured to complement the visual semiotics of a nightmarish descent. The constant presence of music underneath the stories is vital, and lends the libertines and their affairs a decidedly bourgeois character.

In the final scene of the film, Pasolini's theory of the "free indirect subjective" nature of his filmmaking is most evident. Pasolini uses the "free indirect point-of-view shot," making the audience see what the character sees, forcing them to identify with the character. As each libertine takes his turn before a window overlooking an enclosed courtyard, through binoculars we see the other libertines, assisted by guards and some of the victims who have "collaborated," raping, torturing, and murdering with focus on the mutilation of sensory organs and genitals. It is graphic in its explicit use of shocking images, yet suggestive because no sound is heard from the courtyard. As the last libertine is taking his turn in the viewing chair, we see a brief shot of the other three dancing happily in a kick-line, like chorus girls.

To best illustrate the metaphorical and cinematic devices Pasolini employs to develop his "theorem of death," I will discuss a particularly striking scene from the "circle of obsessions." The first image is a long-shot of the libertines standing with the madames and guards at the end of a geometrically ordered room. The following image of the stairway leading to that room reveals the captive boys and girls naked, crawling up the stairs on leashes, barking like dogs. They are led into the room, where the libertines feed them scraps of rancid meat. The victims, all too aware of the consequences of disobedience, play the part of hungry dogs. As the magistrate sets down a bowl of meat, he commands two of the boys to eat; one does so, but the other refuses by shaking his head. The magistrate yells, "Eat! Eat! Eat!," and begins to beat the boy savagely with a whip until he falls unconscious. The Duke engages in a brief dialogue with the bishop, while the magistrate, his passion not yet sated, inserts nails into a piece of cake. He then feeds the cake to a young girl, who obediently begins to eat it. Moments later, she emits a horrifying scream, which causes the Bishop to smile, and blood begins to pour from her mouth.

Pasolini clearly identifies sadism with fascism in Saló- each becomes a transparent metaphor for the other. What was once a mere tale of sadism and extreme atheist philosophy becomes hopelessly interlocked with the substance of fascism through the setting of the film in fascist Italy. This characterization is one that brought great criticism to the film, and even provoked one critic, upon exiting the theatre to remark, "Luckily, they killed him."

To understand Pasolini's focus on these imagistic concepts, it is necessary to delve into his theoretical writings on cinema. In his treatise, The "Cinema of Poetry", Pasolini defines the creative process of the filmmaker as follows:

...there is an entire world in man which expresses itself primarily through signifying images (shall we invent, by analogy, the term im-signs?): this is the world of memory and dreams.... The activity of the cinematographic author...is not single, but double....he must (1) take the im-sign from the meaningless jumble of possible expressions (chaos), make its individual existence possible, and conceive of it as placed in a dictionary of meaningful im-signs (gestures, environment, dream, memory); (2) fulfill the writer's function, that is, add to such a purely morphological sign its individual expressive quality. In other words, while the activity of the writer is an aesthetic invention, that of the filmmaker is first linguistic and then aesthetic.1

For Pasolini, an im-sign is the filmic equivalent of a language-sign, or word. Im-signs form the basis of Pasolini's mode of filmic communication, and it is evident that each image in Saló contains a carefully constructed meaning.

Interpreted through this theoretical lens, the scene previously described takes on "individual expressive quality" beyond the obvious parable of fascism/sadism. The "purely morphological sign" of the naked and mute victims being violated is contextually informed by a recurrent emphasis on the class struggle. Throughout the scene, the libertines and madames look on with mild amusement; Pasolini has created an im-sign of extreme bourgeois decadence rather than one of direct fascism. Through the "gesture" of their cruel relationship with the clearly proletarian victims, Pasolini has created a painfully direct analogy of sadism to fascism to neo-capitalism, a term which, in his critique means the new fascism of consumerist pseudo-democracy. The forced consumption of rancid meat later becomes that of human feces. The boys and girls are imagistically force-fed, indirectly and directly, the very worst products of humankind. In a literal sense, they are physically made to eat excrement, and ideologically they are forced to consume the nihilistic thoughts and behavior of the fascists. Pasolini uses the im-signs to articulate his critique, focusing on the literal-ideological parallel.

This im-sign interpretation would be incomplete without analysis of the brief dialogue between the Duke and the bishop that occurs after the magistrate's whipping of the disobedient boy.

DUKE: (to MAGISTRATE) Excellency, are you convinced? It's seeing those who don't enjoy what I do, and who suffer the worst, that provides the fascination of telling oneself: I'm happier than that scum they call the people. Wherever men are equal and there isn't that difference, happiness cannot exist.
BISHOP: Then you aid neither the humble nor the unhappy?
DUKE: (to BISHOP) In the world, there's no voluptuousness that more flatters the senses than social privilege.

What is Pasolini saying here? One reading suggests that he is likening the "arid-rationalism" of fascism/sadism directly to the simple rationalization of the bourgeoisie. It is very telling that as the Duke says there is "no voluptuousness that more flatters the senses than social privilege," the Bishop is simultaneously inserting the nails in the cake and feeding them to his victim. The gesture of the horrifying im-sign in synchronicity with the seemingly simple bourgeois rationalization epitomizes the central tenet of Pasolini's "theorem of death:" sadism, through the mask of Italian Fascism, is equal to the atrocity of neo-capitalism. The cumulative effect of this film is even more disturbing; Pasolini's statement is even more extreme. As Naomi Greene so incisively states:

In some ways, the "scandal" of Saló goes beyond politics, beyond ideology, beyond even sexual horror... spectators of Saló are drawn inexorably into a web of complicity with the monstrous libertines- a terrible web where they are compelled to see both Pasolini, and themselves, as one of their number.2 As the spectators are thus compelled to identify with the libertines, Pasolini is doubly effective in the expostulation of his theorem. Beyond the personal horror of an individual experience, spectators are directly challenged in their beliefs, their lifestyles, their sexualities.

Saló holds deeper insight to Pasolini's character when placed in opposition with his earlier work. Pasolini's previous films were revolutionary and challenging in their depiction of the class struggle, but were also largely lyrical with imagistic poetry, and were even sometimes life-affirming and positive in their depiction of the inherent dignity of the poor. Shortly before his death, Pasolini wrote a renunciation of three such films known as the "Trilogy of Life." They were The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights. In the renunciation, Pasolini states: "Even the "reality" of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, enslaved by consumerist power... The collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past. Life is a heap of insignificant and ironical ruins... I readjust my commitment to a greater legibility (Saló?)"

Pasolini's life of self-abnegation ended with this most disturbing change of ideology. It is enigmatic that Pasolini, a Marxist, a champion of the poor and disadvantaged, denied the past and the essential vitality of humanity in exchange for a "greater legibility." Perhaps it was personal dissatisfaction with the hopelessness of his sexuality, as depicted within the frantic impotence of the libertines, that caused this violent swing of ideas. He may have simply resigned himself to his frightening view of the universality of human cruelty, as expressed by the exponential growth of neo-capitalism.

With Saló, Pasolini's artistic life saw its end. He even once stated that "Saló goes so far beyond the limits that those who habitually speak badly of me will have to find new terms." The release of Saló was shadowed by photographs of Pasolini's disfigured corpse, and the outrage of the intelligentsia was enormous on many levels. Pasolini, it might be said, may have sacrificed himself to prove his "theorem of death." Though it is my belief his death was conspiratorially motivated, he was likely aware of its reality. As he said, "Without death, life has no meaning." Saló and Pasolini's death are so inextricably linked together, that they have provided two-part harmony to end the lyric poem of his life. The concept of his death and utter dismay with life are the ultimate expression of the entire trajectory of his life's work.

1. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. "Heretical Empiricism," Indiana University Press, ©1988.
2. Greene, Naomi. "Cinema As Heresy; The Films of Pasolini," Pantheon, ©1991.