“Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” is the Most Disturbing Film of All Time
Brutal, explicit, revolting, cruel, depraved, shocking, horrifying…
Pasolini’s loosely adaptation of a book described by its author as “the most impure tale ever written” might be, almost 45 years later, the most disturbing film of all time.
Ante Inferno
Yesterday morning, for the purpose of writing an article about the most disturbing film I’ve ever seen, I re-watched Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Italy, 1975). It did not disturb me as much as when I watched it for the first time was my first impression after this second viewing. But as the day went by, I began feeling more and more disturbed, even nauseous. Again this morning, when thinking about sitting down to initiate my writing, I felt that disturbance and nausea even stronger than yesterday.
Then I remembered something: that was exactly what happened after my first viewing! After all, this is one of those movies that the mind needs to process and “digest” first before it starts to really disturb you. The effect of disturbance comes during and after this digestion process; it’s not until you assimilate the whole thing that your mind starts feeling quite distressed.
I watched Salò for the first time a couple of years ago, after deciding to do a school presentation on Italian cinema, which included the mention of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s filmography. Mama Roma was a must-watch, but so it was Salò. Writing the script for my project made me uncomfortable, and I was more so on the presentation day. Any imagery of anything related to this film would disturb my mind (even the word “Salò”). Life felt as if seen through a dark lens. I ended up deciding to just vaguely mention the film in my presentation, commenting on it as “the most disturbing film I’ve ever seen in my life” without giving any details about its premise, as a means to avoid the rest of my presentation being ruined by disturbing imagery.
Interestingly, something similar happened to me this morning. When thinking about writing this article, I simply didn’t want to. I didn’t want to spend time with that imagery in my head for the period of time that it would take me to write the whole story. A different, safer idea crossed my mind: to make a listicle of the most disturbing films I’ve seen in order to keep from spending too much time with Salò on my mind, as I could simply just vaguely mention it along with several others films (the same strategy I used for my presentation). Because having multiple disturbing films on my mind (the most disturbing films I’ve seen) is better than to focus solely on Salò.
What makes Salò so disturbing?
And why is it that the disturbance comes later on rather than during the viewing experience? It occurred to me that the most terrifying aspects of the film do not rely on gore or explicit sequences (which the movie does have) but rather on the philosophies and beliefs of the protagonists, what these entail, how likely it is that people had stood by them (and if some still do), and how reasonable and legitimate these seem to be. This is a movie where the horrors — the monsters — are found in the dialogue.
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here”
— Inscription at the gates of Hell in Dante’s DIVINE COMEDY
During fascist Italy, in the republic of Salò, Nazi territory, four powerful men, a Duke, a President, a Bishop, and a Magistrate, kidnap 18 teenagers based on the physical attributes they find attractive. These teenagers, 9 young men and 9 young women, are about to experience an inferno by falling prey to the hands of powerful fascists, who can do with them as they please.
Some of these victims appear to come from wealthy families, as it is mentioned that the father of one of them is a senior judge like the Magistrate, and apart from the 18 teenagers, the fascists marry each other’s daughters, who from there become their victims too. “Bourgeois recoil not from slaughter though victims are son and daughter,” says the Duke. This makes the premise even scarier; it states that no amount of money, power, or beauty could save you when faced against real and absolute power, represented by the four monsters of this horror film. Therefore, in the first part of this film, titled “Ante Inferno,” the horror is in the sense of all hope being lost.
An equivalent of Dante’s quote above is that of the speech the Duke gives to the victims when they are brought to the entrance of a palace near Marzabotto, in which the horrors will occur. This introductory speech pretty much surmises the premise of Salò:
“Your herded, feeble creatures, destined for our own pleasure, don’t expect to find here the freedom granted in the outside world. You are beyond the reach of any “legality.” No one knows you are here. As far as the world goes, you are already dead. These are the laws which will govern your lives:
At six p.m., the company will assemble in the ‘Hall of Orgies,’ where our Storytellers will tell us stories, each with a particular theme. Our friends have the right to interrupt at any moment. The purpose of the stories is to inflame lust; all will be permitted. After dinner, the gentlemen will conduct the so-called orgies. The Great Hall will be adequately heated. Participants, appropriately dressed, will lie on the floor like animals. They will intermingle, copulate indiscriminately, incestuously, and sodomistically. That will be the daily procedure … Any man caught in flagrante delicto with a woman will be punished by the loss of a limb. The slightest religious act by anyone will be punished by death.”
The following thoughts and reflections about what makes the dialogue in Salò so disturbing were not there for me on my first watch; they were rather hidden somewhere deep inside my mind, a place I wouldn’t dare to explore. On the other hand, my second watch made everything clearer because this time, I had more context. It’s not just the fact that I had already seen the film, or read the book from which it was adapted: Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom; it was also because I had read On Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche. Having this in mind, it’s not surprising to find in the film a scene in which the fascist reference the German philosopher.
“The principle of all greatness on Earth has long been bathed in blood … No forgiveness without bloodshed.”
— The Magistrate (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom)
“The moral conceptual world of ‘debt’, ‘conscience’, ‘duty’, ‘sacred duty’, has its breeding ground — all began with a thorough and prolonged bloodletting, like the beginning of all great things on earth.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On Genealogy of Morality (Zur Genealogie der Moral, Germany, 1887)
According to Nietzsche, human memory is made of promises and contracts, and pain is the best method to create a memory. Memory is made of blood. This does not mean that human beings were cruel and violent with each other to create a memory. No, the reason behind cruelty, says Nietzsche, is that others’ suffering produces pleasure in humans. Memory appears then as a result, but not that it was created by purpose.
One of the main premises found in Genealogy of Morality is that morals have its origins in the relation between buyers and sellers, debtors, and creditors. In ancient times, when a debtor couldn’t pay their creditor what they owe them, some alternatives were paying with their own body, their life, their freedom, and/or with their own suffering. That way, the right to be cruel to those who cannot pay their debts was created. Creditors would exercise this right of cruelty because this produced a benefit for them in which the debt could be sealed: the benefit of the pleasure that being cruel produces. After being punished by the hands of their creditors, debtors could then be forgiven; hence “without bloodshed, there is no forgiveness.”
At first sight, one might interpret the scene in which the fascists quote Nietzsche as them looking to justify their cruel acts. When watching movies that depict cruelty, we might attempt to look for justifications so that they provide us with some relief, something that gives suffering a meaning (because meaningless pain is much worse).
Take Jigsaw (Saw, USA, 2004), whose torture games intended to make his victims appreciate life; or the cult members in Martyrs (France, 2008), who torture women in search for transcendence; in other movies, torture is done for interrogation purposes (El Laberinto del Fauno, Spain, 2006); sometimes a character is cruel to some villain that was just as cruel as a form of revenge or “justice” (I Spit on Your Grave, USA, 1978). Even in cases where a character is cruel for apparently no legitimate reason or for simple pleasure, a justification might exist in the form of a villain who’s mentally ill and irrational (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, USA, 1974), or not even human (It, USA, 2017).
However, a lot of thought, logic, and reason went into a book such as On the Genealogy of Morality, a book that, under its own logic, “makes sense.” The ramifications that this can produce in our minds make this film, under this philosophical context, the most disturbing film of all time.
But if nevertheless, we were to interpret the scene as a justification for cruelty, there’s something that doesn’t fit: the victims didn’t do anything! They don’t owe them anything, there is no debt to be sealed, no forgiveness to be granted! It turns out that these fascists don’t need a justification to obtain the “right” to be cruel; they have this right simply because they are who they are. Their malice is disinterested, something that tends to be the main trait for the evilest characters we can imagine, and the fact that Nietzsche is being referenced in Salò makes the evilness of these four libertines scarier, given that Nietzsche, in the same book, referred to this disinterested malice as “a normal propriety of man.”
“We fascists are the only true anarchists. Naturally… once we become masters of the state, true anarchy is that of power.”
— The Duke (Salò)
There is no scariest monster than one who is above authority, one who operates from impunity and for self-pleasure. In the film’s opening scene, the Bishop says, “all things are great when taken on excess,” which is the opposite of “excess of anything is bad.” Those of us who abide by the famous old prober might do so because we live in a society that condemns excesses in a way that if we participate in such, we could potentially receive some kind of punishment.
True anarchists, the masters of the state, would be the exception to this rule. They are at the zenith of power; it doesn’t get much higher than that. When a human being reaches that point, what comes next? We find the answer in the things that the four monsters in Salò have committed their existence to: hedonism and debauchery to the extreme, the art of enjoying life, as opposed to what the common people dedicate their lives to, which is working to, hopefully, reach a point in which there is nothing else left than to enjoy the rest of life.
These four fascists planned this out. They, experts on experiencing pleasure, organized this in such a way that it will maximize it.
“Nothing is more contagious than evil,” says the Magistrate. This parts from the same idea that disinterest malice is not only normal propriety of man but something that humans greatly enjoys. But the Duke corrects the Magistrate:
“You are mistaken, Your Excellency. Some can do evil only when passion drives them to it. They are always unhappy, regretting the evils of the previous night.”
— The Duke (Salò)
Not everybody is “strong” enough to do evil, and even when they do, they will later feel guilty. This is due to the feeling of guilt, or “bad conscience,” which exists (so we hope) in the majority of human beings today. This bad conscience was born as a product of social obligations, sustained by violence and cruel punishments. However, these social obligations were not created by contracts; they were rather imposed by force by the “strongest” men. This is how the state was created: by force, cruelty, and blood. With their master morality, the aristocrats did not have this sense of guilt, this bad conscience, because, having absolute power, they were never punished for their actions! Therefore, they could enjoy a lifetime of pleasure and excesses, the freedom to be led by human’s animalistic instincts, which include violence, cruelty, and all sort of mania.
“You know, I respect all tastes and whims. However baroque, all deserve to be respected. Because we are not their masters, even the most bizarre manias derive from a basic principle of delicacy.”
— The Bishop (Salò)
These libertines do not look at their manias as depravities; instead, they consider them delicacies, refinements. The reason for this could be that their morals are likely based on Nietzsche’s master morality, in which everything that the masters (the aristocrats) do is fine and good since they make them happy.
Lacking the feeling of guilt, a master’s tastes will differ massively from those of “the people” who do have a bad conscience. From the people’s perspective, the master’s tastes would be seen as depravations. But for the aristocrats, these tastes, whims, and manias represent their power and nobility, which distinguish them from the rest. The “people” are not refined enough to enjoy a delicacy like, for instance, human feces.
Circle of Shit
In the film’s segment titled “Circle of Shit,” both the fascist and the victims eat nothing but human excrement for several days. This is obviously torture for the victims, but the fascists are simply enjoying a delicacy, and this distinction marks the difference in their status.
On Genealogy of Morals also touches on how the bad conscious (enhanced by the birth of the ascetic ideals and religion) made humans feel disgusted with their own nature, their animalistic instincts, their own body, and its fluids. According to Nietzsche, the reason we feel disgusted by things such as our own urine and excrements is that our bad conscience makes us feel ashamed of ourselves, with our own animalistic nature. The fascists in Salò not only do not feel disgusted by these; to the contrary, they like it, and they also eat it. The more hideous the feces are (for us at least, for “the people”), the more exquisite they are for them. It is a privilege to be able to enjoy something that most can’t.
“It’s folly to say one owes anything to one’s mother. Must we be grateful for having pleasure with a man? That should have been enough reward for her.”
— The Duke (Salò)
Signora Maggi, one of the Storytellers and a prostitute, tells a story in which she wanted to visit a client who was “notorious for his depravity,” something that produced in her an immense curiosity. Signora’s mother pleaded her not to go, and Signora, who “couldn’t resist the temptation,” killed her. The Duke then comments: “that was the only thing to do. The excitement awaiting you was supreme meriting the utmost sacrifice…” and then he reveals that he killed his own mother as well. After hearing this, Renata, a girl who had lost her mother after she was killed trying to protect her when she was being kidnaped, breaks down in tears.
When watching this scene, before it was revealed the reason why the girl cries, I thought (even on my second watch) that she was crying out of terror after realizing that her kidnappers are worst that she could’ve thought. If she had a drop of hope that they would be merciful, this must’ve vanished at that moment. But she does beg for mercy right after, albeit the mercy of death. “Don’t think your tears restrain my desire; they make me more ruthless,” is the response she gets.
“It is when I see others degraded that I rejoice knowing that it is better to be me than the scum of ‘the people.’ Whenever men are equal, without that difference, happiness cannot exist … no voluptuousness flatters the senses more than social privilege.”
— The Duke (Salò)
The difference between the Duke and Renata is that the Duke is a real aristocrat, one that lacks a sense of guilt, someone without a bad conscience, someone that we, “the people,” would refer to as a “psychopath.” The Duke killed his own mother with no remorse, whereas Renata suffers for the dead of hers. Despite her being, in the outside world (the world of “legalities”), likely a daughter in a bourgeoise family, inside of this palace is nothing but “scum” when compared to a real aristocrat like the Duke, who finds her whining and begging to arouse.
Circle of Blood
“To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still.”
-Nietzsche, On Genealogy of Morals
The most gruesome and gory scenes come in the last part of the film, titled Circle of Blood. We see torture without censorship: genitals being burned off, one guy getting his tongue cut off, another getting his left eye gouged out, a girl getting scalped… The fascists take turns to be both torturers and observers; from a window, they watch the spectacle with binoculars. If you are sensitive, these scenes can disturb you, but more disturbing is to watch two of the fascist’s soldiers, who collaborated in the tortures, dancing in the last scene of the film.
Pasolini was a brave artist. Only the bravest of artists would attempt to make a film adaptation of such a book. The director approached the themes depicted in Salò as a critique against the dehumanizing effects of fascism. I can’t say the same thing about the author of the book from which this film was adapted. In The 120 of Sodom, Marquis de Sade seems to me (given that he was libertine himself) to be glorifying the themes and philosophies depicted in his book (immensely more disturbing than the film).
There’s a scene where one of the fascist’s soldiers is caught having sex with a servant. The soldier raises his fist in the air (a Socialist salute) before him and the servant gets shot dead. In such a film, a scene like this constitutes a huge relief. Thank God their death was quick and with small pain! Sadly, it adds to the disturbance that Pasolini’s wasn’t.
