Spec­ta­cles of suf­fer­ing and fas­cism in cinema

There’s a scene in Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Pao­lo Pasolini’s final film, in which the char­ac­ters – four debauched lib­ertines, eight recruit­ed men, four hired sex work­ers, and the young men and women brought to a seclud­ed man­sion by the cor­rupt quar­tet to be tor­tured – eat fae­ces. In a mock wed­ding recep­tion for two peo­ple who have been forced to mar­ry each oth­er, every­one sits at tables in a vast din­ing room, and eats fae­ces. Many of them don’t com­plain; some make jokes, some flirt. This might be the scene in Salo that’s hard­est to watch – and there are plen­ty to choose from – but it goes to the heart of what’s made the film mor­bid­ly com­pelling for decades now: the way it presents fas­cism on screen illus­trates the vio­lence and ugli­ness of the ide­ol­o­gy, turn­ing it into a spec­ta­cle of suffering.

At the core of Salo are the four lib­ertines – The Duke, The Bish­op, the Mag­is­trate, and The Pres­i­dent – who exer­cise their fascis­tic con­trol through the tor­ture of 18 vic­tims (nine men and nine women), aid­ed by col­lab­o­ra­tors who either tell sto­ries of debauch­ery and suf­fer­ing, or act as a vio­lent fist for the four men. In Salo, the ugli­ness is the point; even the vast­ness of the dilap­i­dat­ed cas­tle is stripped back and grey. The first shot of the film is the town of Salo itself (a fas­cist por­tion of Italy that was con­trolled by the Mussolini’s Nazi-backed pup­pet state from 1943 – 45) and those ear­ly images are shot through with Pasolini’s sense of pas­toral beau­ty, as he pre­pares to reveal the vio­lence lin­ger­ing beneath the sur­face. When the vic­tims are first round­ed up and led into the cas­tle, the cam­era lingers in the door­way; there’s a small rec­tan­gle of light and nature behind the char­ac­ters, and the cas­tle itself. Every­thing sur­round­ing the door­way is pure darkness.

This approach to visu­als – a con­trast between the light of free­dom and the dark­ness of fas­cism; an objec­tive gaze cast over bru­tal vio­lence – con­nects Salo to oth­er, more con­tem­po­rary films that use film to explore and cri­tique fas­cism. These con­trasts are at their most abun­dant in Guiller­mo Del Toro’s dark fairy­tale, Pan’s Labyrinth. The short-lived pas­toral exte­ri­ors that open Salo are tak­en to extremes in the sprawl­ing, mag­i­cal land­scapes vis­it­ed by the young Ofe­lia as she seeks to escape the iron grip of her new step­fa­ther, Vidal, a vio­lent and cru­el offi­cer in the Civ­il Guard in Fran­coist Spain (par­al­lel to Mussolini’s Italy, the set­ting of Salo). While the late-night adven­tures of Ofe­lia, and her encoun­ters with mag­i­cal crea­tures – the trick­ster-like Faun and ter­ri­fy­ing Pale Man – del Toro presents escapism into fan­ta­sy as a response to fas­cism. Where Ofelia’s world is full of sweep­ing cin­e­matog­ra­phy and fas­ci­nat­ing, trans­form­ing land­scapes, there’s an aus­ter­i­ty to the way that Vidal is presented.

Pan’s Labyrinth is punc­tu­at­ed by bursts of vio­lence enact­ed by Vidal; in one ear­ly scene that demon­strates his cru­el­ty, he kills a local farmer by pound­ing in his face with the bot­tom of a bot­tle. The score is min­i­mal here, with the empha­sis on the dull, repet­i­tive thud­ding against the farmer’s face. Del Toro illus­trates that vio­lence is not only a require­ment for show­ing fas­cism on screen but, for all of the opu­lent visu­als of his fan­ta­sy world, it isn’t some­thing that can be aes­theti­cised, but must be pre­sent­ed with stark, unfor­giv­ing real­i­ty. Even before Salo descends into its most depraved scenes, it does this; when a vic­tim tries to run away before being tak­en to the cas­tle, they’re shot dead by fas­cist sol­diers. There’s no score, no cer­e­mo­ny to this death – it’s pre­sent­ed as the most nat­ur­al thing in the world which, under the cold gaze of Pasolini’s lib­ertines, it is.

There’s a stark­ness to the visu­al lan­guage of fas­cism in both of these films; whether in the sim­plic­i­ty that Del Toro shows us Vidal’s ded­i­ca­tion to order in the cer­e­mo­ny of shav­ing, shin­ing his boots, mould­ing him­self into a good sol­dier, or the aus­ter­i­ty of the man­sion in Salo; for all of the scale in the man­sion, the rooms lack dec­o­ra­tion, and are often pre­sent­ed in black and white. It’s as if there were no way for visu­al adorn­ment to exist along­side fas­cism. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Ofe­lia is first vis­it­ed by the Fawn on the night that Vidal kills the farmer; her move into the fairy­tale world becom­ing a direct escape from the vio­lence and ugli­ness of fas­cism. Salo, of course, offers no such escape, and instead the more it reveals the deprav­i­ty of the lib­ertines, the more they rel­ish it, the more it becomes clear that the suf­fer­ing is the point, the spec­ta­cle itself, with the dec­la­ra­tion ​“that howl­ing is the most exquis­ite thing I’ve ever heard.”

Along­side a con­tin­ued explo­ration of vio­lence, the lib­ertines in Salo demon­strate the ways in which the ide­ol­o­gy is able to exert con­trol over peo­ple; there are sev­er­al scenes in which the man­sion becomes a micro­cosm for a fas­cist state. From the mock wed­dings that The Bish­op offi­ci­ates over, offer­ing a per­verse legit­i­ma­cy to their actions, to the Black Mass that begins the film’s third sec­tion, ​‘The Cir­cle of Blood’, in which fas­cists and their col­lab­o­ra­tors – the young men hired to act as either Black­shirt sol­diers or sex­u­al ​“studs” at the begin­ning of the film – exchange rings with one anoth­er, in a mock wed­ding. The lib­ertines are dressed in drag, and this cer­e­mo­ny becomes an over­ture to the film’s most vio­lent sequences. But before this final blood­let­ting, the remain­ing vic­tims all begin to turn on each oth­er, betray­ing secrets in order to stay alive – every­thing from a pho­to­graph hid­den under a pil­low to one of the for­mer col­lab­o­ra­tors hav­ing a secret lover, is fair game – and every­one who can’t pro­vide a secret on some­one else is put to death. It’s here that Pasoli­ni reveals the end­less­ness of fas­cist vio­lence; this is an ide­ol­o­gy that can­not exist if it runs out of ene­mies, and so is more than will­ing to turn on those that were once loy­al to it. Vidal does the same thing in Pan’s Labyrinth, shoot­ing his own sol­diers in the mid­dle of com­bat after declar­ing ​“They were use­less, they can’t walk.”

The con­trast between the escapism of fairy­tales and the bru­tal real­i­ty of Fran­coist Spain in Pan’s Labyrinth car­ries with it an idea of child­ish inno­cence, some­thing else that fas­cism can crush under­foot. In a con­ver­sa­tion with her moth­er, Car­men, about the crea­tures that she’s seen, Ofe­lia is told ​“I believed in a lot of things I don’t believe in any more,” as if her child­hood and belief in mag­ic is some­thing that won’t keep her safe for­ev­er. This feels mir­rored in The Child­hood of a Leader, Brady Corbet’s 2015 film that illus­trates the com­ing-of-age of Prescott, a young boy, and how his world-view becomes con­tort­ed by fas­cism. For much of the film, Cor­bet approach­es the onset of this ide­ol­o­gy in a far-off, almost abstract way – the boy refus­ing to apol­o­gise for throw­ing rocks at oth­er kids; tem­per tantrums; stub­born­ness – with it occa­sion­al­ly man­i­fest­ing in much more stark, phys­i­cal acts: the vio­la­tion of his tutor, or, in the film’s final act (the film is struc­tured around three of Prescott’s tantrums, which feels like a call­back to the way Pasoli­ni struc­tures his film around three, Dante-like Cir­cles) an explo­sion of vio­lence. Because of course, the only way a jour­ney towards fas­cism can end is with such an act.

In the epi­logue to Child­hood of a Leader, Corbet’s cam­era moves through the long cor­ri­dors of a gov­ern­ment build­ing, as the machin­ery of the state thrums to life; there are long takes of domed roofs as the cam­era spi­rals, and a group of offi­cials pass paper­work back and forth, each adding a sig­na­ture: a Sec­re­tary, a Coun­cil­lor, an Advi­sor, and a Deputy (like Pasoli­ni before him, Cor­bet offers a quar­tet). They are wait­ing for their leader – the child, now grown – who emerges from his car to legions of ador­ing onlook­ers. But Cor­bet focus­es on a child in the crowd, who looks up at Prescott; as if the rot that got into him is contagious.

Pasoli­ni shows this too, in the cycle of betray­als and col­lab­o­ra­tions at the end of Salo. For all the vio­lence and ugli­ness on dis­play across these films, the char­ac­ters are some­times giv­en the abil­i­ty to look away – as the waltz­ing sol­diers are in the final scene of Salo, talk­ing about the girls they’ll come home to. But these films refuse to give the view­er that same abil­i­ty, leav­ing us with the ugly spec­ta­cles of fas­cism – the mil­i­taris­tic pre­ci­sion, the vio­lence, the desire to escape – and the fact that it can only ever be pre­sent­ed as itself; no metaphor or mag­ic can con­tend with it, and the bit­ter­ness of all three end­ings asks us to think about what can be done in the face of such horrors.