Pier Paolo Pasolini, 21st century thinker
5 reasons why everybody should acquaint (or reacquaint) themselves with postwar Italy’s greatest renaissance man
Pier Paolo Pasolini was, until recently, one of those names with which I’ve had a passing familiarity, but little beyond that. I first recall encountering his name thanks to one of Monty Python’s more obscure Flying Circus skits entitled ‘The Third Test Match’, a brilliant lampoon (I later realized) of some of the man’s more iconic 1960s-era films, most notably The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) and The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), in which classic Pasolini imagery depicting sex, violence, and church-and-state tyranny are surreally inserted into an English countryside cricket match.
My second encounter with Pasolini occurred a few years ago when I finally built up the nerve to watch his legendarily shocking and still controversial swansong picture Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a film that will remain filed in the “glad I watched but I’d never want to sit through again.” For those of you unfamiliar with it, Salò takes the Marquis de Sade’s notorious novel The 120 Days of Sodom and transplants it to World War II-era Italy at the twilight of fascist rule in the country (specifically the Republic of Salò in the country’s northeast, one of the country’s last fascist strongholds). The film centres on four vile fascist libertines who kidnap local boys and girls and subject them to a parade of sexual and psychological tortures, each one more reprehensible than the previous.
The moral panic surrounding the 1975 film (which was quickly banned in most countries) was further heightened by the fact that its release coincided with the director’s still-mysterious assassination, a crime that has yet to be conclusively solved. Giuseppe Pelosi, a 17-year-old gay hustler who had been with Pasolini on the night of his death, originally confessed to the murder and went to prison for it, but retracted his confession many years later, fuelling a plethora of fresh theories on author and filmmaker’s death. His final magnum opus would, I’m sure, still proven to be a thorny and controversial piece had it not coincided with his violent and enigmatic departure, but the events surrounding his death have become inseparable from Salò’s enduring lurid mystique.
In the years since watching Salò, I have further explored P3’s filmography, most of which is challenging viewing but nowhere near as bone-chilling as his final film. This in turn led me to explore his non-cinematographic oeuvre, which is far less known outside the italophone world but if anything all the more awe-inspiring. Pasolini, after all, was much more than just a filmmaker. To this day in his native country he is at least as well known as a poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic, philosopher, playwright, and left-wing political activist (and a long-suffering member of Italy’s beleaguered Communist Party), and arguably Italy’s most formidable renaissance man since Leonardo da Vinci.
His poetry in particular is bewitching (even in translation), possessed of a gut-wrenching incantational quality, and his politically charged essays (or “provocations” as he calls them) speak to a lucidity of thought that transcends the epoch in which they were written, and at times read as though they were written for a present-day readership.
P3 was, in so many ways, a man ahead of his time. An openly gay man in a deeply homophobic society and an outspoken atheist in Catholic-to-the-core postwar Italy, Pasolini was at once a card-carrying communist but at the same time consciously aware of his own middle-class privilege, and unceasingly critical of his fellow leftists for their animosity towards the military and police, whose ranks, he often pointed out, were overwhelmingly filled with sons of the peasantry — in stark contrast to the bourgeois protesters who filled the streets of Rome and elsewhere in the 1960s. In an era defined by black-and-while ideological distinctions, P3 was the eternal rebel and agent provocateur who made a career of confronting people with uncomfortable truths. He understood privilege and the subtle mechanisms of tyranny, and expressed them like few artists ever had. And the haunting humanity expressed in his poetry is at times too raw to bear.
Pasolini the poet, Pasolini the philosopher, Pasolini the filmmaker, and Pasolini the activist: all are vehicles for a singular and unflinchingly honest voice that in many ways feels as though it were tailored more for the early 21st century rather than for his own time. Unfortunately, due in no small part to the outsized media attention accorded to his controversial cinematic output, P3 the writer and philosopher has, since his death, largely been forgotten outside his homeland. This is unfortunate, because the man was, in virtually every domain he touched, a visionary ahead of his time whose themes dovetail with many of the issues being grappled with by today’s politically and socially active bloggers and artistic malcontents.
Here are my five top reasons why we should all rediscover Pasolini:
- He recognized that the liberal virtue of ‘tolerance’ was a crock of shit.
“Tolerance,” wrote Pasolini, “is always purely nominal, and is little more than a more refined form of condemnation.” Unlike many in our society who publicly espouse ‘tolerance’ and ‘multiculturalism’, P3 understood, as others have noted, that ‘tolerance’ is simply a sociological band-aid that fails to address genuine social inequalities and injustices, because it fails to address the unequal relationship between the ‘tolerated’ party and the powers that be, who generates social capital from choosing to tolerate rather than condemn.
Today this emblematic in the having a black/gay/gender-non-binary friend as a badge of pride and the incessant media squabbles over political correctness, as well as the ongoing discussion of the “limits of tolerance” vis-à-vis the current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe and elsewhere. Tolerance, as P3 would no doubt point out if he were still with us, is at the heart of Europe’s existing integration issues, where immigrants are ‘permitted’ to settle in countries like France and Belgium but then effectively kept outside the societal mainstream by way of unspoken social and cultural barriers, creating ghettoes and fostering intolerance and extremism. A more refined form of condemnation indeed!
Tolerance, multiculturalism, and diversity — all these are states of existence which the ‘left’, broadly speaking, espouses as ends in themselves, and the ‘right’ challenges as unworkable, unreasonable, unfair intrusions of nanny-state PC culture, or even dangerous to our physical safety (as in “letting the terrorists win”) or our eternal salvation (i.e. “erasing our Judeo-Christian values” or something like that). Pasolini, always the contrarian, would take both sides to task, excoriating the right for their flagrant hatefulness and the left for their failure to understand that tolerance and diversity don’t do anything in and of themselves to challenge systemic inequalities, and that real inclusion is much easier to talk about than to actually accomplish.
2. His warnings about runaway consumerism were spot on.
Pasolini’s Italy was a country in the midst of precipitous transition from an impoverished, predominantly agrarian society to an increasingly urban, middle-class society at the heart of capitalist west. Amid this rapid transformation, Pasolini was foremost among the country’s leftist intellectuals in condemning the new postwar culture of consumerism, well before the age of Thatcher and Reagan-era neoliberal economics and the emergence of an anti-consumerist backlash.
“I consider consumerism to be a fascism worse than the classical one,” stated P3 in one of his last interviews. “Clerical fascism didn’t really transform Italians, didn’t enter into them. It was a totalitarian state but not a totalizing one.”
Pasolini’s equation of consumerism with fascism may strike many even today as hyperbolic, but considering that he was writing at a time well before today’s corporate scandals, before the era of microtargetting, before Enron, before Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the “too-big-to-fail” banks, and before the ascendency of billionaire media mogul-turned-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (a man reminiscent of many a Pasolini film villain), who not only tanked the Italian economy but also oversaw the consolidation of the country’s media to such an extent that Italy now ranks 77th in the world in press freedom — easily the lowest ranking in western Europe and among the worst in the developed world, and the old economic divide between the rich north and the poor south remains as glaring as it was in P3’s days.
P3’s postwar anti-capitalist angst invites parallels to another controversial literary figure from the post-Axis world who died in similarly bizarre circumstances: Yukio Mishima. Like Pasolini, Mishima came of age during wartime and enjoyed popular renown as his country was in a state of breakneck economic development and social upheaval, regularly courted controversy as both an artist and a political activist, and mourned what he saw as the erasure of his country’s cultural heritage and values in the pursuit of consumerist creature comforts. That said, Japan’s vainglorious wannabe poet-warrior could scarcely have differed more from the shy, self-effacing Italian intellectual, character-wise, which is why Mishima, brilliant wordsmith though he was, is, unlike Pasolini, no longer taken seriously as a thinker.
3. He was deeply cognizant of his own privilege (even as he himself was being persecuted).
P3’s relationship with the Italian Communist Party, of which he was a longstanding member, was complicated and at times acrimonious. While his antifascist zeal and contempt for the centre-right Christian Democratic wing of Italian politics (whom he saw as the harbingers of consumerism-driven fascism ‘lite’) gave him common cause with the PCI, he notably clashed with the party in 1968 amid the 1968 student protests in Rome when he publicly declared his sympathy with the police, or more specifically the individual police officers. Pasolini excoriated the young protesters, calling them “arrogant daddy’s boys” and accusing them of hypocrisy by championing workers’ rights while simultaneously attacking the “sons of proletarian southerners” who made up the ranks of the police.
Pasolini’s very public defence of the police in the Valle Giulia riots of early 1968 struck many as odd, given the writer and filmmaker’s own track record for run-ins with the authorities, having been charged with everything from obscenity and pornography to contempt for religion and the state. But P3 was always hyper-conscious of his own privilege, as the well-educated son of middle-class northerners, and throughout his life never sought to cast himself as a victim. Even in his critiques of his fellow communists, he never sought to separate himself from what he accurately saw as systemic problems in which he himself was just as culpable.
“In reality, we have acted with the fascists,” he wrote in reference to his fellow communists in 1974. “We immediately accepted them (the police) as representatives of evil. Maybe they were eighteen-year-old adolescents who didn’t know anything about anything, and they rushed headlong into any horrible adventure simply out of desperation. But we could not have distinguished them from the others. This is our dreadful justification.”
Unlike Mishima, who appeared to believe he could remove himself (and those who followed him) from the straightjacket of postwar capitalist Japanese society through armed insurrection (either that or he simply wanted to put on a good show while living out his suicidal fantasies), P3 recognizes that any sort of meaningful social change would only come by way of a long and fundamentally boring process of adapting institutions. In his writings he refers to the eventual ‘abolition’ of the country’s capitalist and educational systems, but prefaces that ‘abolition’ is better described as ‘adaptation’.
Revolution, as the term was understood in the late-1960s and early-1970s, could only, he believed, result in the replacement of one form of fascism with another, because the people doing the revolting had yet to unpack their own privilege. And in an era where people are frequently challenged to ‘check their privilege’, we would be all well advised to brush up on our Pasolini 101.
4. He was an early champion for the protection of minority languages.
Minority languages as cultural custodians were a subject very dear to Pasolini. While the lion’s share of his literary output was in standard Italian, he also wrote extensively in Friulian, a minority language in his native northeastern region closely related to the Romansh language of eastern Switzerland, which he spoke fluently, while also notably employing the Neapolitan language (officially a “dialect” but very much distinct from standard Italian) in his 1971 film Il Decameron. In his writings he deplored the state-sanctioned linguistic homogenization of his native country, a trend that would not be curbed until well after Pasolini’s death in 1999, when the Italian government finally gave official recognition to a handful of minority languages, which included P3’s native Friulian but notably not Neapolitan.
Pasolini linked language death to the onslaught of consumer culture, which he frequently identified with incipient fascism. “The purging of dialect, and of the particular culture of each dialect, represented a loss due to the new power of the consumer society in our culture, the most centralizing kind of power, and thus the most substantially fascist, as history reminds us,” writes P3 in a 1974 essay on the Sicilian dialectal poet Ignazio Buttitta.
“The people are always fundamentally free and rich: They can be chained, stripped, gagged, but they’re basically free. Why? Because they have their own culture, and to have this vehicle to express yourself is to be free and rich, even if what you are expressing (in relation to the ruling class) is misery and lack of freedom.”
Today the concept of ‘language death’ is becoming common parlance, and grassroots movements aimed at curbing the decline of minority languages abound from Cornwall to Hokkaido to Vancouver Island. Still, language death continues to accelerate across the globe (it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks), making P3’s warnings about the loss of culture and knowledge through language death all the more salient.
5. Salò is little more than a graphic dramatization of a typical Internet hatefest (or an out-of-control Trump rally).
From the graphic shit-eating scenes to the gang rapes to the gruesome tortures meted out in its final climactic scene, Salò is a truly horrifying spectacle. But is it any more than, say, the vile comments typically left by anonymous trolls on CBC news stories about missing and murdered Aboriginal women (until they shut them down), or the threats of violence against female gamers during the Gamergate campaign and other such spats? Ask any woman, person of colour, or LGBTQ individual in the public eye about the details of the hate mail they’ve received, and chances are you’ll wind up with a parade of colourful and imaginative acts every bit as nasty as the ones dreamed up by the four libertines in P3’s swansong picture.
Salò was, more than anything, a graphic distillation of Pasolini’s deepest fears about humankind and its basic cruelty, a theme that pervades much of his writing, particularly towards the end of his life. Were he around today to explore the depths of the Internet, I doubt any of his fears would be assuaged. And a fresh 2016 viewing of P3’s most controversial film would no doubt invite comparisons to the Trump campaign, a Pasoliniesque spectacle in and of itself, with his boorish red-capped supporters reminiscent of the film’s young brainwashed collaborator characters.
“We fascists are the only true anarchists,” declares the Duke, one of the film’s four leading antagonists. How very piquant an observation, particularly in an era of deregulated markets, Ayn Rand worshippers, and conservative Republican candidates who get applause for saying they’ll carpet bomb sovereign countries (an actual war crime, Ted), electrify border fences, and allow sick people to die in the streets. And they say Pasolini was immoral??
So why do we live in a world where Ayn Rand is still touted as an important thinker while Pier Paolo Pasolini is barely remembered as anything other than a smutty Italian filmmaker? Probably because P3, unlike so many polemicists of both left and right, was an equal-opportunity agitator who set out to make absolutely everybody feel uncomfortable. Reading and watching Pasolini is an exercise in confronting uncomfortable truths — truths about our world and ourselves. I think it’s safe to say that nobody’s ever left a viewing of a Pasolini film or put down his writings feeling better about themselves and their role in the world, regardless of their political stripe. That’s just not what he did.
And in this world we need his brand of candidness more than ever. In our media landscape, we all instinctively gravitate to media outlets that support our existing prejudices and world views. Now more than ever we need people like P3, who will drag us, kicking and screaming, away from our happy places, into parts of our psyche and our world that we’d rather pretend don’t exist.
For an excellent overview of Pasolini’s poetical and essayistic oeuvre, and for several of his interviews, look for Jack Hirschmann’s superb anthology entitled In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s renowned San Francisco-based City Lights publishing house and featuring translations by a whole host of contributors, including NYC poet Norman MacAfee, the great San Francisco singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman.
