Thanks El Senor Duke for bringing up yet another film which I refuse to watch - Salo. For years I have heard of this grotesque film, many friends whose opinion I respect trumpeting its classic status. Once again, a bit too avant garde for my taste, though after sitting through the shit known as American Wedding, I suppose my stomach can now handle anything. My question is this - "How many folks truly watch Salo for its peculiar philosophical take on humanity and how many simply leer at the demented atrocities committed against children, etc..?"

How much good can a film like this, or GG Allin for that matter, truly do for our society? When does artisic expression go too far? I suppose The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover has similar scenes, and I especially loved a nude Helen Mirren, with middle-aged sagging body, trapped in a truck with loads of rotting meat. There was a beauty to the grotesque scenes, a sort of combination of grand opera and Grand Guignol.....

But my most accounts, Salo leaves that film in the dust.....Though I suppose in a country and region scarred by WW II atrocities, perhaps it was a film that needed to be made. But still, is not Salo going a bit too far, the type of film that only the sickest and most perverted will feed upon?

I have made the mistake of viewing films whose reputation preceded them before - Caligula, Mark of the Devil - and I still can't get some of those horrifying images out of my mind. I would be worried Salo would be a similar experience....

Chris, you make valid points there - certainly, if one were inclined to savour the most wretched nonsense fathomable, then Salo holds plenty of interest, but i dont think we can blame the film for sections of its eventual audience.
Also, upon viewing the film again, its striking how much of it is actually restrained, as far as visuals go. Things are suggested, and hinted at, that are far more distressing than the final 15 minutes of chaos. I think its a incredibly thoughtful film, and there is a concern there about how far one can allow society to debase itself. It's not comfortable viewing, although there is, as always with pasolini, a level of satire and wit that perhaps make it more rewarding than some of the films you mentioned. Ultimately it's a cry of ourage, and a film much more moral than you might imagine from its reputation. But certainly not one for everyone. And really, there are probably just as many people who get off on The Parent Trap. There are plenty of sickos, but its best not to assume that they're chosen obsessions are neccesarily to blame.

Salo is a totally horrendous film to sit through, and there's nothing to be gained by doing so -- but it is kind of interesting as Pasolini's experiment on audience reaction.

See, at some level, you could almost say the man who made this film hated his audience, because from the perspective of a viewer, it's just painful, and I think Pasolini may have even been raising a question: why are you watching this?

I think he wants to make you self-conscious, to make you ask yourself why in the hell you're watching two straight hours of gore and coprophagy. Are you entertained? Are you interested? And if you are entertained and interested, what does that say about you? Are you that far above the Nazi terrors on display -- are you not taking part in them vicariously?

I think Pasolini -- a little like Bunuel when he made Un Chien Andalou -- wanted to shock liberal viewers out of their complacency, the viewers who are so smug and tolerant; he wasn't exactly on their side.

Rodney, thanks for your comment!
I have to disagree though. I think Salo is a tremendously rewarding film, most of all perhaps for the very reason you mention - That it is an attack on liberal complacency. The horrors of fascism DID come to pass, and folks just let it happen.
It's an incredibly moral film, as i stated in the article. Only someone with a deep love for humanity could fret so obsessively over where it might end up.
As for the "why are you watching this?", Mikele Haneke (sp?) played a similar trick in his Funny Games, which had such carry ons as the characters rewinding the action because something grotesque took place off screen. "They want to see it!" they suggested. It's an incredibly smug work, though, unfortunately.
Unlike Salo, which is, as with much of Pasolini's work, a feast of wonderment.

I don't agree at all -- even if it's an attack on liberal compacency, it's not what I would call "rewarding," really; in that case it's less a movie -- let alone a "moral" one -- than a kind of Pavlovian experiment which reduces the audience to so many Alexs from A Clockwork Orange.

And, for another thing, I think the gross excess of the movie takes you out of whatever Pasolini was trying to say: I found myself thinking about all those actors being abused and humiliated by the director -- who seemed to be doing the same thing to us, watching it. A "deep love of humanity"? Are you kidding? It's less a film about sadism than it is an act of sustained sadism -- a feast of shit that is no "feast of wonderment."

Maybe not rewarding as in makes you feel all good about yourself, but intellectually, it's as stimulating as, i dunno, someone shooting you in the skull with bullets of statistical data.
There's obviously something to what you say about how this is simply an act of saidsm to assault the viewer, i mean after all, this WAS based on a Marquis De Sade number, but sometimes you have to be wilfully antagnostic to get folks to pay attention, although the desensitisation you alude to is certainly worthy of exploration also. Ultimately, it's a much more textured work than even this debate about the obscenity of it all might suggest. You have to admit, though, surely, that it's a more thought-provoking experience than something like SS Experiment Camp, which adopted pasolini's (and De Sade's) grotesqueries with no political or social consideration whatsoever. Wether or not he achieved it is debatable, but he certainly INTENDED for it to be more than just a carnival of debauchery.