About forty years ago—perhaps fewer—hardly anyone could have imagined that the final film of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, writer, and director, would in some way foreshadow the Epstein case. By making Salò, or the The 120 Days of Sodom, set in the city of Sodom (sin), he showed that within a closed system, power can do whatever it desires.
Half a century has passed since the first and last public screening of The 120 Days of Sodom—a film banned in more than fifty countries around the world not only because of its explicit and disturbing scenes, but also because of its fierce political message. The film was completed by the renowned Italian director Pasolini only weeks before his mysterious murder in 1975, and this fact turned Salò into one of the most controversial works in the history of art. It was a film that did not merely depict sexual violence; rather, it demonstrated how unchecked power turns human beings into commodities.
In the film, eighteen innocent boys and girls are subjected to physical and sexual torture for three months, making it difficult for many viewers to watch this horrifying work to the end. A film in which it is explicitly stated: “Nothing is more contagious than evil acts.” And now we are confronted with the sinister Epstein case, which seems to reproduce the same violence portrayed in Salò. Both places—Epstein’s island and the city of Sodom—are isolated spaces where such terrible events occur, with neither media nor cameras present to record what happens. For this reason, some critics believe that Pasolini, through Salò, prophetically anticipated Epstein’s island.
Approximately twenty-one days after the screening of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom at the Paris Film Festival, Pasolini’s body was discovered on the beaches of Ostia. He had been brutally beaten and then run over with his own car. Although a young male prostitute later confessed to the murder, the mystery behind the assassination remains unresolved to this day, and many believe it was connected to the revolutionary and anti-establishment content of the film.
Salò was based on the unpublished novel The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, but Pasolini transferred the story from eighteenth-century France to Italy in 1944, during the final days of the fascist puppet regime known as the Republic of Salò. In the film, four wealthy and depraved men—representing law (the Judge), religion (the Archbishop), aristocracy (the Duke), and politics (the President)—kidnap eighteen teenage boys and girls and take them to a remote mansion. There, for 120 days, they enslave them completely and subject them to unbearable psychological and sexual torture.
The structure of the film is cleverly inspired by The Divine Comedy and divided into three “circles” or “rings” (Girone):
- The Circle of Manias
- The Circle of Excrement
- The Circle of Blood
But why is Salò so shocking? Unlike many horror films that conceal violence behind metaphor or spectacle, Pasolini was determined to expose the true face of fascism in its naked form. Scenes such as tongues being cut out, scalps being torn off, and genitals being burned are portrayed with a cold, documentary-like realism.
Yet in his final interview about the film, Pasolini stated: “In this film, sexuality is nothing more than a metaphor; an allegory for the commodification of bodies exposed to power. I believe today’s consumerism manipulates and violates bodies no less than the Nazis did.”
He believed that Mussolini’s classical fascism was a finished phenomenon, but that the new fascism of consumer capitalism was far more dangerous and all-encompassing—much like what can be seen in the Epstein case. For this reason, the executioners in his film wear elegant modern clothing and combine bourgeois manners with the most savage forms of human cruelty.
The reaction to Salò was swift and violent. Only a few weeks after its limited release in Italy, the film was seized by court order and declared subject to destruction. In the years that followed, the film remained banned in Australia until 1993 and was confiscated again in 1998. In Britain, it was not granted permission for video release until 2000. In Germany and New Zealand, censored versions were released during the 1990s, and in many countries public screenings are still considered criminal offenses under the law. Ironically, while the film was banned throughout much of the West, it became a cult work among intellectuals and was eventually selected by Time Magazine in 2001 as one of the “100 greatest films in cinema history.”
The enduring question about Salò is this: was the film made merely to shock audiences, or is it far deeper than it appears? The great critic Serge Daney believed that the horrifying aspect of Salò lies not in its explicitness, but in the helplessness it imposes upon the viewer. There is no shortcut, no salvation, no escape from the violence. The form of the film places the audience in the position of a surviving victim. As a result, many viewers refuse to continue watching it and are unable to finish the film in a single sitting, even over the course of a day.
Vincent Canby, the critic for The New York Times, wrote in opposition to the film: “Salò is a perfect example of material that may be acceptable on paper, but once visualized on screen becomes so repulsive that it strips the human spirit of its humanity.”
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is not a pleasurable cinematic experience. It is a raw political analysis that refuses to let its audience sit comfortably. With this work, Pasolini left behind a testament that cinema is not merely for entertainment; cinema can be a hammer capable of shattering the skulls of oppressive systems. More than half a century later, the film still possesses the power to disturb its audience, to drive viewers away, and yet at the same time to raise this eternal question: in order to escape fascism, must human beings allow their own eyes to confront reality—even when that reality is unbearable?
