Creative suicide. There is no need to guess about the meaning, since the director himself revealed it. According to Pasolini, he made a film about contemporary power, in which sex is a metaphor for the interaction of the authorities with the population. We are shown the aristocracy, the secular power, the judiciary and the church, embodied by four nameless peasants. They use their captives as things for perversion and cruelty. Although all the participants are fascists, all power is meant. Nowhere in the film is there a hint of the difference between fascist power and any other. Thus Pozolini hints that you, the bourgeois government of today, are no better than the fascists. The idea is transparent: any power only perversely has, feeds shit and tortures its people. We also see siloviki who are more or less indifferent to what is happening and “just follow orders”, but always act in the interests of the authorities. The intellectuals are the strongest, represented by three elderly prostitutes and musicians. According to Pozolini, if the people are always victims in power, then the intelligentsia prostitutes, using their talent to serve the needs of the elites, no matter how monstrous they are.
The very concept of the absolute abomination of any power is interesting. I do not share it, but I would like to see it embodied in a good drama. If the director had gone that way, something might have turned out great. But Pozolini preferred an hour and a half of the most nauseating monologues, images and eating feces and torture. From the point of view of the main idea, the film is a clear failure. “Salo” is not known as a film about the nature of power, but as “the most scandalous”, “the most forbidden”, “the most disgusting”. Form perception has replaced content perception.
The answer is simple. Pozolini was a Marxist but believed in his sublime communism with a pony and a rainbow. By the mid-70s, bourgeois elites had ruled Italy for 25 years and were not going to leave. In the late '60s, they remembered the well-forgotten old. The neo-fascists and radical communists regrouped and were struck by the greatest historical injustice – they were not in power. To correct the story, they turned to street violence, of which Pozolini himself was a victim. There was also the Communist Party. But for communists there have always been two ways of living and acting: communist and wrong. To them, Pozolini, with his religious feeling, homosexuality, eroticism and other rainbow communism, was a crazy pervert. So without hesitation, they kicked him out of their private club. Pozolini remained isolated. Three political groups he loathed with an increasingly burning, bitter hatred. The fourth loved him, but she didn't love him. There remained the bourgeois intelligentsia, which refused to convert to his pink communism, but applauded his genius and demanded spectacles. Descending ever deeper into despair, Pozolini decided to spit in the face of the very intelligentsia from which he himself emerged and which was the only one who was interested in him! You want a show? Get high-pitched conversations about scooping up feces and enjoying eating them.
The film was not about the nature of power or even the reproach of the intelligentsia. A film of frustration, despair and anger, caught up in the crisis of the director, who decided to troll his audience thickly. In all this history, it was the bourgeois intelligentsia that best behaved, which saved Salo from censorship and defended Pozolini’s right to freedom of creativity. This is the right way to react to such a creation: “We heard you, we disagree with you.” But if fascists or communists were in power, they would have banned Salo, and the author would have been put in jail or in prison.
It ended well. So hated Pozolini bourgeois elites rallied, caught most fans of black style and bald Chinese, sending them to the state houses of less exquisite architecture and decoration than that shown in the film. And modern Italy was born. And Pozolini erected a monument to himself not made by hand. What a creator, such a monument.