#17: Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom + Why You Never Need to See This Movie
Good morning, friends!
This week I started watching a show on HBO Max called The Great Pottery Throw Down. It’s like the Great British Baking Show except pottery and one of the judges cries (with joy) every episode. When I lived in D.C. several years ago, I threw pottery every week for a few years. I didn’t pick it back up when I moved to Pittsburgh for school and about 4 minutes into the first episode of this show, I was searching the internet for a pottery wheel.
The point is, the world is on fire in dozens of new and old ways. If there is *any*thing that keeps the heat out, even if it’s small, we’ve gotta capture it and trust it and guard it with our lives. For me, it is The Great Pottery Throw Down and the pottery subreddit to figure out how I can make a home studio in the basement, a concept that in January would have been ludicrous and today, 6 months into a global pandemic that has no signs of slowing down, making time and money functionally meaningless, is much less ludicrous.
9/29 FUND RACIAL JUSTICE/ACTION ITEM:
As you probably heard, the state of Kentucky decided not to charge the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor in her home back in March. Given that there can be no justice after a life is gone, and there will also be no accountability taken by those responsible for her death, all we can do now is send funds and support to Breonna Taylor’s family, protest and support protestors and continue to support the movement to defund the police.
If there are protestors in your city, you may support your local bail funds. If not, you may support Louisville protestors by donating to bail funds such as the Louisville Community Bail Fund. You may also donate to BLM Louisville.
9/29 MOVIE BY A BLACK FILMMAKER REC:
This week, I’m recommending Creed, directed by Ryan Coogler. Josh and I saw this one in the theater the fall it came out and since it’s Officially Fall, I always think of this movie this time of year. It’s so good and Michael B. Jordan is great in everything, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get on it! Available on YouTube and Amazon.
#17: Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Country: Italy
Year: 1976
Runtime: 116 minutes
Language: Italian
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
OhKAY.
So, I was, as you know, not at all excited to see this movie. As the opening credits played, Josh read from the little booklet that’s included in the DVD (Josh owns most of these movies), which called it “one of the most shocking pieces of cinema ever made.” Yeesh.
I am highly sensitive in MANY ways. Many. But I am, generally, not deeply moved or shocked by movies or TV. I’m not immune to being scared or grossed out at ALL but, I’ll watch almost anything, even if I dread it because after a night’s rest, I’m usually over it.
But! This movie is easily one of the worst ways I’ve ever spent 2 hours. I’m annoyed that it’s in the Criterion Collection. I’m confused about the messaging. And I won’t be recapping it in full here.
In the beginning, I took notes as I usually do, like:
Beginning credits begin with pretty upbeat jazzy music. This makes me even more nervous.
Subtitles: 1944-45 Italy during the Nazi fascist regime. Title card reads “The Antechamber of Hell.” Yikes.
Four old male fascists sit around a table signing a book.
Scene of 4 teen boys picked up from their homes by fascist soldiers.
The 4 boys who were captured now wear fascist uniforms and push 4 young women into a room with the 4 old men from the opening. The women are the men’s daughters and the men will be marrying each other’s daughters.
In a big room, dozens of teen boys line up while the old men walk around, write the boys’ names on paper and put them in a glass box. They ask two of the boys, Franco and Sergio, to undress which just means leaving on all of their clothes and showing their dicks. Sooooo something is going on that I don’t understand and already hate.
We learn that these boys have been kidnapped from local families, some of them from enemies of fascism, like professors.
The old men arrive at a house full of teen girls where an older woman picks out two girls, Eva and Albertina. They undress Eva in front of the men, but Albertina is sent away because she is missing a tooth. Next is a teen girl who is naked and crying for her mother.
The 9 boys and 9 girls are taken away in a military caravan. One of them escapes from the truck and is shot as he runs away. So now there are 9 girls and 8 boys who arrive at a mansion with the men and women who picked them, along with the 4 teen boy soldiers and the daughters.
One of the men, from a balcony, begins to read from a book as the teenagers gather below: “Weak, chained creatures destined for our pleasure. You are beyond the reach of any legality. No one knows you are here. As far as the world is concerned, you are already dead. At 6 pm we will all gather in the orgy room where we will read stories.” He reads more rules, which include committing adultery and sodomy.
This is just the worst.
Title card says: CIRCLE OF OBSESSIONS
One of the older women (who, it turns out are all sex workers and collaborators) wears a WILD gown and gathers as a piano plays. She tells a story to all of the people about being sexually abused by a teacher when she was a child.
One of the men interrupts her and asks for more detail so that he can get more turned on. This is like the worst acting class of all time. So, she tries again, this time with more dialogue and movement, as she performs to every corner of the room.
In the middle of her story, one of the adult men, who had taken one of the teen boys into an adjoining room, returns with his clothes a mess and MAD. The boy didn’t satisfy him, I guess, and one of the older women offers to help him out. He responds, despondent, “You know there are a thousand occasions when one does not desire a woman’s anus.” Only a thousand? The star of the one woman show is unfazed.
At dinner, the adult men discuss evil, saying it's contagious.
The daughters serve them all, totally nude.
One of the old men bends over and shows his naked ass to all the boys, saying “look carefully!” while one of the soldiers rapes one of the daughters.
This is where I stopped taking notes.
I didn’t stop watching, in the hopes of some sort of revenge twist at the end where all the fascists are lit on fire or something (not even close, just FYI) AND because I said I would watch all of the Criterion movies in a row and sometimes I have a pathological commitment to self-imposed rules that don’t matter. It gets just...unbelievably explicit and violent and I realized that there was ZERO reason to recap this movie like I usually do. The recap would just be a list of different ways these teenagers were raped and tortured and murdered.
Instead, while the movie played in the background and we paused every so often to go “Jesuusss…,” Josh and I had a conversation that I thought was much more interesting than the film.
We talked about how this film presents a visceral, direct reminder of greed and capitalism and patriarchal and fascist power: powerful, well-dressed rich people exploiting other people with none of that power. It’s gross and totally base and embarrassing to watch people be so awful. And the Nazis did actually do a lot of these things in private. Fine.
However, I also offered that as a woman in the world, it has no value to me. I know this reality of violence exists everyday because I walk around with it in my body. One day in my lifetime, in a very real way, someone could take away my right to an abortion or birth control or I could be raped. For Black people, this very real vulnerability is also carried in ways that I don’t experience. Indigenous people, since the first colonists stepped foot on their land, have carried this stripping of bodily autonomy, too. It happens to marginalized people all the time. We each understand, on a visceral level, the specific ways in which we are vulnerable to people and systems more powerful than us. It’s not a “concept.” It’s real. So I don’t need to see the torture and rape of teen girls and boys as an allegory for how fascism is bad. It feels lazy and uninteresting and if its main purpose is to shock, then I find that lazy and uninteresting.
This isn’t to say that people can’t explore challenging subject matter, like rape or violence, in movies and TV. I think of a show like I May Destroy You, which was created completely by the survivor herself. There is shocking content in that show. For sure. But 1) it is in the survivor’s hands, where it belongs, and 2) it’s asking challenging questions that have not been asked in that way before. No spoilers, but questions of memory and truth and of revenge and power. It is generative. These questions have not been answered, but they also haven’t been posed, publicly, in the way she is posing them.
But simply seeing brutal acts of sexual violence and torture over and over again for 2 hours...I don’t know what is generative about that. I don’t even know what worthwhile question it is asking. Is fascism bad? Is rape bad? Is absolute power that corrupts absolutely bad? Is water wet? Ask something interesting that doesn’t require using rape as an artistic vehicle!!
None of this even touches the fact that this movie is an adaptation of the novel The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, who was a famous rapist and pedophile from which the word “sadism” is derived. Like, what are we doing??
Anyway, I absolutely hated this movie in every way and I can pretty much guarantee that you don’t need to see it, either. It’s the equivalent of the “do you like see-food?” joke that kids play and it sucks.
Onward and upward, bbs.
Next up is The Naked Kiss, which whatever it is, it’s not this movie so it’s gonna be great.
XOXO
Steph