Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands at a window and raises a pair of opera glasses. Below him, in the courtyard, something is being done to a body that the film will not let us see in close-up. What we see instead is the watching: the small civilized instrument lifted to the eye, a record turning behind him, one libertine politely waiting his turn at the glass. This is how Pasolini ends Salò — not on the atrocity but on a connoisseur arranging his distance from it. Hold that image. The whole film is in it.

The coarse old menu files Salò under the impulse-image, and for once the menu is exactly right. Deleuze put the impulse-image between feeling and action, and built it from the naturalists — Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey — directors whose worlds run on raw appetite. His key move: a real, furnished place (he calls it the derived milieu) turns out to be only the crust over an originary world, a zone of pure drives older than any society. Pasolini gives us the cleanest derived milieu imaginable. A rationalist villa, polished floors, tasteful furniture, the modern lines that the cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli lights cool and even, like an official document. And beneath that decorum: nothing but drives. The four masters aren't characters who want things for reasons. They are appetite given chairs to sit in. Paolo Bonacelli and the others play them with a bureaucrat's blandness, which is the point — you cannot psychologize a drive.

Deleuze said the impulse-image always falls along a line of slope, an entropy that drags everything down toward exhaustion and death. Pasolini borrows Dante to draw that line as a staircase. Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, the Circle of Blood: not a rising dramatic arc but a graded descent, each circle introduced by a signora reciting from the stairs as though performing in a salon. And the drive fastens onto its fetish, its charged part-object. In Sade it would be a relic; here it is the banquet of excrement, consumption made grotesquely literal — the body fed its own waste. Once you see the slope, you see why there is no rescue and no reversal. A system grinding toward its end has no need of suspense.

But the impulse-image alone doesn't catch what makes Salò unbearable in its specific way: the elegance. For that, borrow a second concept — Deleuze's crystal of decomposition, his name (from Visconti) for an aristocratic, ordered world rotting from inside its own refinement. The libertines are connoisseurs. They preside like a tribunal, they catalogue and savor, they discuss the bodies as a collector discusses porcelain. Fascism, Pasolini argues, is not chaos; it is taste applied to human beings. The rot wears the manners of the salon, and Morricone's sparing piano lays a thread of incongruous gentleness over it. That gentleness is the crystal — order so complete it has begun to stink.

Notice how little of this is acted in the ordinary sense. Bodies are arranged into friezes, numbered, married off in a mock ceremony, posed. Deleuze has a word for a posture that stops being behavior and becomes the bared display of a relation: the gest. Every tableau in Salò is a gest — the enthroned masters, the displayed victims, the staircase recital — and what each one exposes is power as pure theater. This is also why the old tag relation-image hovers nearby: Pasolini transposes cruelty into spectacle rather than dramatizing it, which is close to what Deleuze called the attraction-image, staging that figures a meaning instead of acting out an event. The film thinks by composing, not by storytelling.

Which tells you what Pasolini actually invented here. He took two enumerating machines — Sade's encyclopedic catalogue of passions and Dante's classified circles — and refused to turn them into plot. He kept them as catalogue. The episodic, body-centered form he had just used for joy in the Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) he now recants — his published "Abjuration" is part of the work — and runs the same enumerative engine in reverse, as commodified atrocity. The frontal painterly framing and the non-professional faces come straight out of Mamma Roma and The Gospel According to St. Matthew, where beauty had framed reverence; in Salò the identical grammar frames horror. Its nearest sibling is Godard's Week-end: the same Brechtian wide shots, the same bourgeois cannibalism-as-allegory, the same refusal to let you identify and consume. That refusal is the argument. By denying the close-up, the rescue, the catharsis, Pasolini blocks the exit where you would normally metabolize screen violence as entertainment.

And the victims? They are numbered, interchangeable, stripped of the individuality that would let you mourn one of them. Deleuze, writing on modern political cinema, said its mark is that the people are missing — the political registered through the impossibility of a people, a community that cannot constitute itself. Salò is that absence rendered as a closed room with no outside.

So return to the opera glasses. The reason Pasolini so often films the worst through a window, at a remove, is that the watching libertine's seat is yours. The film hands you his distance and dares you to enjoy it. You finish it understanding, with a coldness you didn't ask for, what it costs to look — and why this most repellent of films is also one of cinema's most rigorous acts of thought.