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it is so horrible, and grisly, and it is. One only needs to see it once per lifetime, but it occupies a place nothing else can, in its flawed, hateful way. Pasolini was particularly radical; he did not want gay rights because he enjoyed the outlaw status of the gay man of the time.

It was mentioned in PASOLINI: REQUIEM, the excellent biography of the director, that Pasolini meant SALO as an attack, pure & simple, on heterosexuality itself, as a negation, indeed, of any affirmation thereof that had popped up in his previous films. Just like the other films, it was an attempt to arrange images & narrative in a manner like poetry, but this time it would be of a much more burnt, dark sort. And when I say "dark," I don't mean like goth. I mean like the apocalypse, because that's what it feels like-apocalypse as enslavement, torture, and death. In a way, the film is a glimpse of hell, but as humans make it on earth.

And it cares not one bit whether you like it or not, which should be respected.
On the surface, it is an adaptation of the only work one needs to read by the Marquis De Sade(because it really is nothing but an endlessly repetitive listing, recapitulation, and reworking of all the ideas he ever had; at some point it's nothing but fragments of lists), THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM. The Marquis wrote this as a final expression of every last bit of hatred against his class as he sat in the Bastille.

De Sade was a slimy individual personally, though did not even a little as much as his works would repute him to have. But his works were not simply meant as something to get himself off-though they did serve that purpose too. They were meant as savage satires of the mores of the dying upper class of France prior to the Revolution. Said satire is clumsily expressed by a writer who had little but bile, but there are nuggets in that bile that let us see the essential inhumanity of what that class had become. (The people he slanders are the same people you see, and loathe, in DANGEROUS LIASONS and RIDICULE, among others)

Many, including Peter Brook, Peter Weiss(MARAT/SADE), Grant Morrison(THE INVISIBLES) and Luis Buuel(L'AGE D'OR) have quoted and reworked it, seeing in its simple excessiveness-it is the most violent pornographic novel ever written; no one would dare top it-an archetype of the real face of power relations in the world, especially in light of the development of fascism. Like them, Pasolini saw in it a metaphor for the basic nightmarish character of fascism-and

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