Beyond Disgust: Pasolini’s Saló

One of the first things you notice in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló: or, The 120 Days of Sodom (Italy, 1976) is how easily the crime is carried out. The fascist libertines just sign a treaty early on, select their victims, and go to the Palazzo. No one protests when the victims are taken off by a group of elder statesmen (The President, the Magistrate, the Bishop, the Duke) under the guise of some state-ordanined purpose. The purpose behind imprisoning the youth is irrational and absurd, twisted. Saló isn’t about the motives behind the crime. Saló is about the complex crime of civilization; what is repressed behind the façade of power and security. The libertines of the film make their youth victims perform a black mass, undergo inspection in the nude, consume shit, and participate in a hysterium of medieval tortures. Pasolini shoots most of this in elegant palatial surroundings, in a quiet, almost deliberately detached manner. The film, you could say, sometimes feels like a reorganization of the senses, of the victims attitudes towards the irrational and the digusting.

Pasolini’s mid-career and late-career works were less interested in comprehensible notions of individual pathology. Collective psychology plays a more important role in his films: ritual, communal solidarity, notions of society and civilization. We never receive motives (outside of the obvious political motives) to justify the agreement the totalitarian men have in Saló. What does Pasolini show us? Nostalgic renderings by elderly women of earlier perverse and sexual experiences, men dressing up as women (and not as drag queens), a black mass wedding dinner where each character is forced to agreeably ingest a steaming hot bowlful of shit, a crooked and obtuse smile on a totalitarian elder’s pink and blotchy face. Pasolini refuses material of comprehensible psychological motivation in favor of the impenetrable and obscure will of the libertines.

Saló portrays a European identity where the horrors of the Second World War were inevitable. After the catastrophe of the First World War, what ingredients must have already been in place to allow for such a monstrous and sprawling degree of human error? How could entire countries and their people condone or cast a blind eye to the genocide and distorted, murderous logic?

A small group of old white men run the show in Saló. Early on, we see them sign an agreement which effectively are the rules of the game. In Pasolini’s view, it is clear that the playing field is often decided and re-established, redefined by those who have power, by those who are “creating” the notion of civilization. In his brilliant film version of Medea (1969, starring Maria Callas), Pasolini frames the argument between Medea and Jason as an argument between competing notions of civilization, one based on law and civil order, the other based on mysticism and the interventions of the gods. The brilliance of Salo comes from Pasolini’s framing of civilization as the organizing principles behind one’s attitude towards disgust.


In Saló, God is in the background, almost as haunting décor. In a room where the teenage hostages are all bound in a tub of shit, and where other lascivious and intimidating sexual acts take place, two praying angel statues observe the action, at the edge of the shot. Pasolini’s point: yes, God and the holy world is watching, but there is no intervention. God in Saló not only watches atrocities (echoing Holocaust survivors like Eli Weisel, who in interviews asserted that—considering the atrocities of the Holocaust—there most likely can’t be a God, or that he abandoned humans, or that if there is a God, it is the wrong one…), but God is part of the atrocity. The whole of Saló is about this notion of watching and not acting; participating by watching. Pasolini pushes this notion of the Gods-eye view within us, as we watch the tortures unfold. The ceremonies of religion merely allow for roles to be inverted, for the digusting to emerge in opposition of the holy. Pasolini seems to be painting a picture that it is the disgusting that is allowed to occur because of the notion of the holy, of the sacred, of the pure.

In the film’s beginning, the totalitarian group of Fascist men, scour the houses of the Italian village for the most supple and beautiful specimens of youth (a play on the Nazi ideal aesthetic of blonde hair and blue eyes). Their selection is cruel. When one of the teenage female victims is selected and ordered to strip in the cigar room for the old libertines, her neck tilts back as she bursts into tears, her jaw drops and quivers, her eyes fall shut, with all her facial muscles tightening and releasing in a sort of ecstatic spiritual pain. The image, later repeated in the famous shit-eating scene by the same blonde actress, is undeniably religious. As tears stream down her face and she stands with her chest bare (Pasolini must want her to resemble something akin to a bawling Mary Magdalene Renaissance statue), the old men stare in fascination: She’s our girl.


The very process of selecting the most beautiful teenagers for the most horrific of crimes is another arena in which Pasolini extends his argument on civilization. Interestingly, the older libertines all have something grotesque about them, in the way they gaze, in their costumery, in the way they speak. And not only are the victims selected because they are beautiful, but the elders (particularly the women) cling bizarrely to this notion of a youthful beauty, which them an element of the grotesque. The worship of the beautiful is recast as the die of pleasure is recast. Saló presents a fascist rhetoric of renewal for it’s young—a mode where daily disgust is met with quiet obedience, where the young, beautiful and innocent go through a rite of passage to induct them in “civilized” fascist society.

There is something about the Catholic image of suffering, the small Italian palace in the countryside where the tortures take place, the focus on costume and make-up (particularly in the grotesque costumery of the older women—lace, frills), the fine silverware and white lace dresses, and finally the parlor salon with a piano where the sordid stories are told. The inventions of the height of European sophistication, elegance and decorum are revealed in context with the shady underside of the tortures and disgusting aspects that allowed European civilization to rise. All that is normally repressed in European society is brought out by the Fascist elders as a series of rituals and games to press on the young in the film. The young are pushed through circles (‘Circle of Blood’, ‘Circle of Shit’, etc) as if pushed through a society’s rites of passage.

In Saló’s final moments, we see the young grouped together in a bathing tub of shit, then caught up in a variety show of tortures and brutal exercises, including the chopping off of one boy’s tongue, the scooping out of eyeballs, the burning of nipples and genitals.

The older men at one point stand, arms across each other’s shoulders, doing a chorus kickline. They all take turns sitting in the palace and watching the tortures occur in the courtyard, with the help of binoculars and two obedient soldier boys holding machine guns. Through the binoculars we see the void of torture—through the point of view of the perpetrators. But Pasolini also seats us inside the room where the libertine is watching the torture unfold. A symphony is playing in the background. One boy is told to obediently help the old libertine out, by jerking him off while he watches the tortures occur. Notably, the piano accompanist who played during the perverse tales earlier on, stares blankly out a window, then gasps—as if suddenly realizing her role—and jumps to her death.

Is the role played in a fascist society essentially a sleepwalking one? Or is this Pasolini’s notion of people living in capitalist society?

Saló’s final shot: two boys holding the machine guns are dancing together—they talk about their girlfriends. They seem oblivious to any subtext between them. They simply are going through the dance steps.