Salo or The Peep Show
blogHuman beings are part of nature, therefore nothing done by a human can be called unnatural. If you want to understand humanity you must study the full range of human activity from Josef Fritzl to Joanna Trollope.
In this spirit, I watched Salo, Pasolini’s version of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Salo is puffed as the most controversial, sickening film of all time featuring torture, excrement, rape, bumming, incest, orgies, and humiliation. But worryingly for me I found it quite tame, even amusing. I had worried that it would make me feel nauseous with outrage, but I found myself quite detached; content to admire the beautiful tableau, which look like they were out of a Goya painting. Perhaps we are living in especially jaded times, or perhaps we find any stylization of perversion impossible to tally with the grim realism that we find on the internet.
With its beautiful Italian interiors and Leger murals, Salo is tasteful torture repackaged for the bourgeoisie. Anyone who has ever strayed onto those dark corners of the internet like humoron.com (don’t click, nsfw etc.) will know that there are far more grisly things out there that don’t quote from anti-enlightenment philosophers.
Far more uncomfortable viewing, for me at least, is the Peep Show which I finally finished this week after having watched all five series on DVD over the last two months. Its protagonists, the venal Jeremy and passive aggressive Mark, are perfect depictions of noughties man. Their interior monologues, representing modern consciousness with horrible accuracy. Anyway, I find them far more shocking than the superficial pantomine of torture in Salo.