Above: Drawn and quartered
In the Cinema of Bad Sex, has there ever been an entry more monumental than Salò? Italian poet, director and cultural heretic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious lamination of the Marquis de Sade’s fantastically cruel The 120 Days of Sodom atop the all-too-actual bedlam of Fascist Italy’s final days has only grown in infamy since its 1975 completion. Its controversial premise: four perverted and powerful Libertines-the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President—kidnap 9 young men and 9 young women from a village and take them to a secluded palace to exploit their bodies and beings over the course of several days filled with sexual humiliation, torture, rape and ultimately wholesale murder. Thanks in part to the very censorship and banning that aimed to suppress it, as well as years of tantalizingly limited home media availability that at one time spurred on collectors to pay upwards of $2000 per out-of-print disc, Salò, recently back in print in the United States through the Criterion Collection, may be more monumental than ever. The monument, of course, would be a phallic obelisk, its presence visible for miles even though the majority of its physical bulk remains unreachable no matter how much time you spend around it. Monolithic. Impermeable. Yet in practical terms, ultimately of questionable civic or social utility. Ultimately just taking up space.
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