Film/ Pasolini: Teorema; Porcile; Salo'

Pasolini- A Proposed Trilogy

Pier Paolo Pasolini made one trilogy- The Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) and intended to make a Trilogy of Death. Salo’ is the only completed film from this intended trilogy. For me, an unintended trilogy shaped itself while viewing Teorema, Porcile and Salo’ at a Pasolini retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

Each film is a masterwork on its own, yet combines with the others in surprising and, perhaps, unexpectedly obvious ways, to create a full and complex vision saturated with Pasolini’s exploration of the nature, boundaries and interpenetrations between the religious and the human. The films also describe an arc of stylistic progression: Teorema is a mythic tale, as pure and stark as an early renaissance mural cycle by Bellini or Carpaccio; Porcile is a time- and world-traveling double story juxtaposing mercantile contemporary sophistication with a 16th century fantastic fable; Salo’ is an anti-tale 3-ring circus from Hell, its cinematic artistry conspicuously inept and fragmented, entirely stylized and utterly without stylishness.


Part One, Teorema

Teorema begins with a desolate and otherworldly rock-strewn landscape seen from high above through a thin scrim of rapidly shifting clouds that look and feel scratchy, harsh and dry. Dividing this wasteland is a jagged line that could be a road; if so, it is a forlorn path toward and from nothing imaginable. Perhaps it expresses division, boundary, a marking of this from that.

Cut to a contemporary documentary-style Interview in which a journalist questions the workers at an Italian factory that has just been “given” to them by the owner: Will it, by default, make them all into bourgeois capitalists? No Comment, the reply. The recollection of this prologue echoes at the end of the film creating a non-existent Epilogue that entirely repositions the premise of the journalist’s question.

Three is a charm: Flash back, now, to the beginning of the mythic tale in its 1960’s setting. The “king” is the factory owner and father. His royal family (the mother, son and daughter) is augmented by the faithful housekeeper, Angelina. Their realm is an exquisite and fully modernized Palladianesque villa with a vast walled garden outside Milan. Though beautifully appointed, it is a sleek and desolate home of icy precision. Even the kitchen is untroubled by any signs of food or use. The sumptuousness is entirely contained in the endless and expensive proportions of smooth polished surfaces.

An unappreciated and imperfectly cherubic messenger of the gods brings a telegram to the gated domain: Arriving Tomorrow, it states. An unexplained and somewhat mysterious attractive, blue-eyed young man arrives the next day and all the pent-up or unacknowledged energies of Eros begin to stir in this household. First Angelina and then the entire family, including the father, succumb to this Adonis’ physical charms. Then, just as suddenly, the messenger arrives with another telegram commanding the mysterious young man to depart the next day.

The royal house is collectively and individually shattered. The divine itself is brought into question: the young man is barely more than a handsome cipher, but one that can intuit and actively respond to the deepest needs of the others.

After the young man’s departure it is again Angelina who is first to respond. She sneaks away from the villa, going home to the countryside. Silently she sits on a bench, eating nothing but nettles, becoming a quasi-pagan proto-saint spectacle for the local peasants who can only understand her gestures in the imagery of the church. She fulfills the faith they invest in her by healing a leprous child and floating in the air.

Eventually she comes down from the sky and beckons an old woman to follow her to an empty excavation site for a new apartment house complex where she buries herself in the soft dark earth. I will not die, she says, signaling for the old woman to shovel more dirt on top of her. Angelina folds herself back into the earth from which she has come and of which she is still a vital part; her separate and temporary individual journey has come to its fulfillment and she reunites with her own earthly essence like a drop of rain falling into the ocean. Streams of tears flow from her eyes not from grief but as the much-needed sustenance for what is yet to come.

The daughter falls into a coma, her right hand clenched as if on the memory of her encounter with the young man, literally trying to hold time still. By refusing to awaken and acknowledge the movement of time, of life, she exists only in the past, trying to make even the future into the past.

The son imagines himself an artist and propels himself out into the world, alone, though obviously generously funded. His stance is a false obsession with futurity and a prideful compensation for what he sees as his shameful recognition of being different, needy and incomplete. He attempts to create a new and perfect world that is little more than attractive formal obfuscation. The illusion of sui-generis expressionistic art cannot hide the reality that all his efforts are guided by the literalized image of the beloved and are an attempt to regain something lost and irrevocably outside himself, not an exploration of anything new. He has not taken in the gift of the divine and therefore cannot create anything from it. Though he convinces himself he is moving fearlessly forward, his gestures are empty and angry.

The mother tries to keep the fire of the divine eternally alive in the present by re-living the act of corporeal love with other young men, picked up randomly on street corners. Her conscious and voluntary degradation ultimately leads her to a decaying and nearly abandoned old church. She understands her dilemma to be religious- a search for meaning that, for her, previously did not exist. She has no illusions about the absence of dimension in her life or the limits of her own capabilities. The encounter with the young man and her subsequent attempts to recreate it simply made her aware of these truths. In honoring that awareness and her own limitation, she at least finds the humility her children lack.

The film’s ultimate scenes with the father are perhaps the most startling, complex and original cinematic evocation of a complete shift in consciousness. The father searches to comprehend the significance and ramifications of his encounter with the young man. He is the only one not entirely enthralled by the idea of revitalization through the erotic aspect, knowing that it alone cannot be the portal to a new dimension. Like Angelina in her very different way, he knows that sacrifice, giving away all that he has gained and achieved- the factory to the workers, his very self to the cosmos- is the only means to achieve an essential freedom from the trappings of persona that limit not only what he sees but how he is seen.

The father enters the train station; where is he going? He sees a beautiful young man, who imagines, as we might, that the older man is looking for sex and cautiously acquiesces to the unspoken request by going into the Men’s Room. But that is not what the father is looking for. He turns away; a young child with its mother wanders by and he kneels down and lovingly smoothes its blond hair and, rising, slowly begins to take off his clothes in the middle of the station.

His action makes him invisible to the outside world. It makes him, for the onlookers, into a “crazy person”. Either way, the result is that he is no longer recognizable, even to himself. The scene shifts abruptly to the wide empty desert terrain where the father, nude as a new-born and equally as defenseless, stumbles across the dusty plain under the searing glare of a harsh noon light, trying to determine a course, a direction, some meaning, anything. He falls into the parched bleached earth and, lifting himself up, screams.

It is significant that no one in the film is evil. The preconceptions and limitations of persona show, except for the father and Angelina, a missing of the message transmitted by the erotic.


Part Two, Porcile

Porcile (Pigpen), the second feature of this proposed trilogy, begins with a view of the same dry, colorless vista that opens and closes Teorema, except that now the rocky landscape is alive, heaving with smoky volcanic activity. A butterfly appears suddenly- a surprising vision of life: colorful, beautiful, and fragile. Equally unexpectedly, a hand darts out trapping the delicate insect and stuffs it into the mouth of a ravenous disheveled young wanderer dressed in the tattered rags of a 16th century European peasant.

Is he the new incarnation of the father from Teorema, reborn in that vast wasteland as a scavenging savage? He hurls boulders at the ground, stalking and killing a gyrating snake, tearing into the warm scaly half-alive flesh with his bare teeth.

Woven into this soon to be far more outlandish fable is the contemporary story of an enigmatic young man, Julian, his crippled father and Julian’s bourgeois fiancée, who coolly and intellectually considers the appropriateness of their intended coupling from a mercantile perspective of increasing profit and multiplying shares.

Porcile is a complex double parable on the theme of blind ruthlessness, seen in two very different environments. The contemporary story is, perhaps, the continuation of what might have happened after the factory of Teorema has been given to the workers. A battle of greed narrows the field to two operators- Julian’s father, a cold buffoon of calculating avarice and entitlement who represents the ostensibly more rarified and retreating modality of bourgeois pretension, and his rival, a jaunty plastic-surgeryed shape-shifter who does whatever is necessary to get what he wants and is aligned with the future, powered by the expedients of science and technology and ornamented with the heartless prejudice of easily distorted data.

These characters are each one side of the same coin and their world is a cold, dead parody of life predicated on the ceaseless flow of product and consumption which is mirrored in the lingering scenes of the huge, bored omnivorous pigs cramped into their compartmented pens, ultimate consumers waiting to be fed until they, in turn, are slaughtered and fed to others.

The 16th century fable centers around the young wanderer who is not just a ravenous scavenger killing and consuming the few living things he encounters, but, it turns out, a cannibal as well. A strange logic and precise rituals, however, guide his actions. When he kills the first of his human victims, a foot soldier straggling behind his troop, he cuts off the dead man’s head and throws it into a smoking orifice in the rocky hillside.

Next we see the cannibal eating the dead man’s roasted flesh, but- miraculously? - at his side, also consuming what would be his own body, is the soldier-victim himself, now regenerated (-from the severed head tossed back into the smoky mouth of Mother Earth?)

The cannibal and his resurrected soldier-victim go on to attack and consume others, always first enacting the ritual of cutting off the head and offering it back into the earth, thus mysteriously increasing the size of their band in direct proportion to the number they kill and consume.

Eventually one would-be victim escapes and makes his way back to the city where troops are marshaled and a trap set to capture the cannibal and his band. In chains and under heavy guard the outlaws are brought to the city to await the word of the court.

In the contemporary story the rival forces Julian’s father to acquiesce to a business partnership leveraged in his favor using the threat of exposure of a questionable but accepted rumor implying perverted bestial sexuality to Julian. The titillating rumor is obviously false yet easier to accept than Julian’s un-bourgeois ways and his maddeningly quixotic impartiality. He could be a figure of redemption, of relief for the others who are trapped in stultifying literal materiality, except that they do not experience their limited reality as suffering. Julian’s fiancée leaves him for a more predictably profitable alliance.

The fable continues as the judges emerge from deep inside the medieval citadel while church bells clang riotously, drowning out the actual words of the sentence they read aloud. The condemnation is the accusation of evil; the punishment: to be taken back into the desolate wilds and tied, each limb attached to a stake driven deep into the earth, their bodies exposed, to be ripped apart and devoured by roaming animals.

The cannibal is unrepentant, accepts his lot and declares his crime: that he killed his father; that he ate human flesh; that he trembles with joy. His followers, though already dead and resurrected, cry tearfully and struggle against their death-sentences in a magical moment of cinematic confusion.

In the film’s ultimate scenes Julian quietly leaves his father’s pristine palatial house, crosses the vast manicured lawn and disappears into the pigpen.

A crowd of peasants arrives at the villa as the party celebrating the business merger of the father and rival is about to begin. They ask to speak not to Julian’s father, the estate’s padrone, but to whomever of the two, father or rival, is strongest. Julian’s father readily and happily concedes his inferiority, declaring himself suddenly overwhelmed by a consuming desire for a cream-puff and lurches out of the room on his crutches, leaving the rival, now partner, to negotiate this unwanted and unseemly interruption.

The peasants, cautious and respectful, barely know how to begin their incomprehensible account. The rival taunts them to be quick and not waste his time. One of them explains that had they not seen “it”, they would never have known: Julian abandoned himself into the pigpen and was consumed entirely, even his clothes, by the huge gluttonous animals. They arrived too late to save him, not even a scrap of clothing could be salvaged to attest to the tragedy.

Not a sole of a shoe, the rival demands? No. Not even a single button, he asks? No, not even a single button, they lament. Then don’t say a word to anyone, the rival commands, happy with the good fortune that yet another inconvenient obstacle has removed itself from his path to success.


Part Three, Salo'

Though all three films hold a line of continuity through detail, ideas and form, Salo’ provides the retrospective arc of trilogy for Teorema and Porcile.

In hindsight Teorema becomes a classic and simple legend of small scale and deep resonance. The earthly horizontal plane of existence and the vertical dimension of psychic depth are united and activated in the characters’ encounter with the divine in its aspect of Eros. Theirs is a world and world-view in which the erotic and the divine are still inextricably linked and alive. The nature of each character’s submission to or rebellion from his/her new awareness is fundamentally a religious experience.

In Porcile the depth dimension has been subverted into the service of the earthly plane of profit and technology. The crippled father and his rival still enjoy the benefit of energies greater than themselves and each retains and maintains a sphere in which to act out that power: the father in culture and history, the rival in commerce and futurity. For both, money underpins it all. In a parody of fevered comedia dell’arte bravura, their interactions are fueled by a sublimated and redirected Eros no longer connected to the divine but banished to the Board Room. Julian has the power derived from depth and interiority but in this thin and brilliant world can find no place where and no one for whom these qualities are credited with value or given room to operate. Being neither for nor against the bourgeois principle he becomes irrelevant and disappears without a trace or sense of loss on the part of the others. They are too consumed with success to take notice or care.

Set in the winter of 1944-45 in a Nazi-occupied northern Italian town of otherwise idyllic beauty, Salo’ is the precinct of unbridled power and corruption of four high government officials. They are called the Masters and derive from Porcile by way of the fable's judges and from the unthinking omnivorous pigs that consume everything (including Julian)- either literally manifested in the animals of the pigpen or metaphorically as the father and rival.

The Masters have assembled a collection of Victims, 18 beautiful adolescent boys and girls, imprisoned, naked, in a rural villa that is a gross and deformed extension of the pleasure palaces of the 18th century. Upon these adolescents the Masters act out their sexualized fantasies of rage, domination and filth. A small band of armed young ruffians, accomplices, supports and enforces the Masters’ authority. Four aging Madams are the Storytellers who take turns in nightly performances meant to ignite the lust of the Masters. The sexual perversions are all predictable and banal and include scatology, humiliation and every form of physical torture and mental anguish.

The actor-Victims seem halfhearted, not really “playing” their parts well, or, as the doomed adolescents, not really taking in their situation as the objects of hatred of the Masters, but how could they, after all? When the Victims start casually turning on one another the viewer’s despair sinks another level. Intermittently scored, the sound of aircraft overhead remind us that theirs is a rapidly shrinking world coming to some kind of apocalyptic end.

The final scenes of Salo’ capture the entire story. Each Master, in turn, watches from a throne placed in a second story window as the others torture the remaining victims to death. It looks like a documentary of the Inquisition, madness and lust disguised and channeled with religious zeal, death and destruction eroticized.

Protecting, or merely “attending” the Master-voyeur are two of the armed guards, themselves just boys. They have the means- their weapons- to overthrow the Masters and put an end to this outrageous tragedy, but they do not see the horror around them, their role is, in a sense, just a job. They don’t share the Master’s tastes but won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

They are bored. One turns the radio dial abruptly changing from the liturgical chant that underscored the last scenes of torture. He finds a smooth, slow dinner dance tune. He asks the other boy-guard, who is slumped in an easy chair, his machine gun splayed across his lap, Do you know how to dance? Not really, he shrugs in reply. Well, let’s try, a little. They carefully set down their weapons and start to dance, awkwardly but not unlike a random couple at a county fair killing time until something better comes along. What’s your girlfriend’s name, one asks? Margherita, the other replies- his mind elsewhere, though nowhere in particular, as death rages in the courtyard below.

The depth dimension in Salo’ is not subverted but gone. The world of Salo’ is a chaotic, capricious nightmare of real tragedy in which there is no possibility of meaning, nor is there the ability, or desire, even, to sustain the search for meaning. Eros is shackled to death; there is no sphere of operation apart from destruction. It is an apocalyptic vision almost entirely devoid of hope for it describes a level of pointlessness, stupidity and cruelty that is impervious to awareness or action. This vision bypasses any position in which the notion of transformation as development could take place. It describes a blackness darker even than the alchemist’s nigredo. That is an abstract principle, not a compromised world in which living beings must try to get by, let alone attempt to fulfill some notion of destiny, character or meaning. It is impossible to imagine that anything could re-generate from this level of corruption without first annihilating itself entirely.