Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been noted as one of the most egregiously profane and violently pornographic feature films ever made.
It is indeed very profane and deeply violent. It is not a fun or pleasant film. It is, however, steeped in political relevance, which only becomes more significant with each passing day.
The Supreme Court, in its decision on obscenity, instituted the “slaps” test. Speech that is highly graphic and offensive in nature may be considered obscene, unless it has serious literary, artistic, political or scientific merit. If you have ever wondered how a work of violent pornography could have political merit, well, this is your answer.
As always, I viewed this film with my trusted submissive at my side, and for once, the film actually held my interest. I may have neglected my poor sissy somewhat, but I have wanted to see this infamous movie for quite some time. I was not disappointed. In fact, I was impressed at how prescient the film actually is. Other reviewers have reduced it to its graphic content, but miss a lot of the symbolism. Perhaps they find the extremity of it too off-putting. As someone who enjoys certain acts of perversion, perhaps I found it more palatable.
If you are not already aware, the film focuses on a band of WWII-era fascists of the Axis powers taking over a town in Italy. There are four men who lead the group, but they have armed soldiers and other accomplices. They select a group of young men and women from their victims and take them to a villa, where they torture and degrade them in every possible way before ultimately murdering them.
It has been said that fetishism and BDSM are the sexual expression of fascism. I don’t believe that there is anything inherently fascist about being kinky, or that the kinky population is any more prone to fascist belief than the vanilla world. But there is certainly a connection of some kind. A fetish for power play could be a way of expressing fears of political repression, or the complicated feelings many of us have with regard to authority. We fear it, hate it, and also desire it, in a very Freudian way, as parents are usually the first authority figures we know. We yearn for approval and fear reprisal, while simultaneously relishing the thought of being in charge ourselves. BDSM certainly provides a sexual expression for these types of feelings.
But on a societal level, power is a tricky beast, and pleasure and sex are never far away. Foucault famously taught that the power that we do not see is more effective, because it infiltrates our inner lives and convinces us to enact it ourselves. Rather than the power simply to repress and deny, which requires a great deal of energy, the power to incite and compel is what drives our modern society. Indeed, without the power to create desire, market capitalism as we know it would not exist.
In fascism, rather than relying on the desire of the body politic, only the desire of the ruling class matters. The body politic ceases to carry meaning except as a means for the rulers’ ends. This is an incredibly short-sighted and unsustainable political system, as taken to its logical extreme, there will shortly be no one left to rule.
In fascism, there is no longer any need to disguise the pleasure of wielding power. It bypasses the delicate business of inciting desire and instead simply requires compliance through campaigns of terror. Foucault doesn’t talk much about rape, as rape is of course a crime of power and violence, not one of sexual desire. But in fascism, power and violence are themselves a source of pleasure, and in the context of extreme oppression, there can be no sex that is not rape.
Salo depicts the personal and sexual embodiment of fascism via the consumption and destruction of the youth for the pleasure and political power of the older generation. The old men take the younger bodies of their victims for their own purposes, disregarding entirely the moral and ethical duty to allow the younger generation to grow and reproduce, ensuring the continuation of the nation, the tribe, the species itself.
Specifically, the old men in Salo claim one anothers’ daughters as their wives. This ancient practice of trading women’s bodies for political power predates fascism by millennia, and remains true even today. And though it is the old men who are in control, the old women are willing conspirators, helping to procure and control the young people.
Salo goes from “that’s my fetish” to much darker territory quite quickly. Many people fantasize about the kinds of sexual objectification and dehumanization featured in the beginning stages. There isn’t even that much physical sadism, at least at this point. It is about establishing power and extracting pleasure from the bodies of their captives. Similarly, in a fascist regime, the ruling class takes what they want from the body politic and from the nation. They compliment themselves on being so highly evolved and sophisticated as to see through the social distractions of religion and ethics. The only thing that matters is power. They don’t need to justify it, or earn it, or engage in anything as foolish as a social contract with the nation. They simply take, and revel in taking, rationalizing that every leader does this, only they are at least honest about it.
Sociopathic disregard for the lives of others isn’t absent in a constitutional republic or a democracy. We may not elevate it to a moral good, but we do fetishize it. Story after story in our culture posits the brutally honest genius as a protagonist whose better judgement tells him that humanity, ethics and compassion are a sham. Sometimes he does good in spite of his misanthropy, but more often he simply moves through life bitter and destructive, taking what he wants from lesser beings and only sometimes suffering consequences because of it. Don Draper, Walter White, Gregory House, Sherlock Holmes, and on and on and on, these men are folk heroes and sex symbols.
The unbothered and unemotional facade of these characters draws us in and seduces us with the charisma of one who lacks inner conflict. The allure of their unfettered self-confidence and naked contempt for rules, tradition and human relations speaks to our insecurity, our self-doubt, our desire to be loved, comforted and disciplined by a powerful authority figure, as we were in our infancy – or our desire to ascend to their lofty height and take the power for ourselves.
In fascism, this type of persona is not only king, it is the national character to which the people must aspire, or perish. But eventually, the pleasure fest turns nasty. In Salo, this is accomplished through the sublime symbolism of a wedding feast at which the conspirators literally serve shit.
Forcing one’s victims to eat their own shit is a masterful allegory for unrestrained political power, indeed. But then, everyone eats it. The fascists have reached the point where the perversity cannot continue to expand without enveloping themselves in its foulness.
In this scene, a fascist leader forces one of the young women to urinate on his face, and then waxes philosophical about the pleasure of being both executioner and victim. Indeed, there is pleasure in being the object in a display of power as well. There is pleasure in being disciplined. Ultimately, however, this cannot be an egalitarian regime. The victims must die, and the aggressors must move on to their next conquest. Once everyone has had enough fun, the real sadism begins, and the violence commences in earnest.
The fascists worship death, and equate their acts of perverse, violent sex with the death instinct. In this context, sex has been removed from not only reproduction, but from love, family, community, and any life-giving instinct. There is a reactionary aspect to the film’s approach. Like many authoritarian regimes in reality, the fascists outlaw religion and destroy both family and community. The destruction of World War II led many in Europe, especially, to question traditional beliefs and values, up to and including the existence of God. But although the fascists in the film mock traditional institutions – with a perverse “wedding” of their own, for instance – the fascists of the 3rd Reich and their allies promoted traditional values and murdered millions for what they deemed “degeneracy”.
Perhaps the film means to say that in the context of violence and oppression, even the most fondly treasured institutions become a demeaning mockery. How can one go back to earnest traditionalism in the wake of such nihilism and destruction? In that sense, extreme sexual desires and fetishes are one way of processing such vast trauma. It isn’t surprising that fetishism and S/m became popular in the post-war period, and the scope and intensity of that interest in Europe is, from what I hear, significantly beyond that of the U.S.
There were many more films on this theme during the post-war period, some of which deal explicitly with fascism and/or fetishism. I’ll be getting to some more of them soon. But next time, we’ll take a bit of a break from such heavy subjects with an underrated black comedy from Scorsese, which happens to be one of my favorite films. It’s called After Hours, and I’m sure my sub will appreciate the change of pace.
The Bee hive 