Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Male Crisis: Between Apocalypse and Nostalgia
- 3 Contesting National Memory: Male Dilemmas and Oedipal Scenarios
- 4 Undoing Genre, Undoing Masculinity
- 5 Pier Paolo Pasolini's Erotic Imagery and the Significance of the Male Body
- 6 Male Subjectivity and the Legacy of 1968: Nanni Moretti's Ecce Bombo
- Notes
- Index
5 - Pier Paolo Pasolini's Erotic Imagery and the Significance of the Male Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Male Crisis: Between Apocalypse and Nostalgia
- 3 Contesting National Memory: Male Dilemmas and Oedipal Scenarios
- 4 Undoing Genre, Undoing Masculinity
- 5 Pier Paolo Pasolini's Erotic Imagery and the Significance of the Male Body
- 6 Male Subjectivity and the Legacy of 1968: Nanni Moretti's Ecce Bombo
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Dozens of teenage ‘boys’ are gathered together in the giant hall of an apparently disused building. They are arranged in rows, military style. A group of older men – middle aged, bourgeois, dressed for winter in heavy coats – arrive and begin to inspect the boys. Some boys are favoured over others. Those favoured are asked to undress, so as to reveal the nature and dimensions of their naked bodies. The boys comply, with somewhat surprising willingness. Their bodies are appraised in silence, the men pass on, the boys raise their trousers and lower their shirts to cover themselves again.
This is how John David Rhodes begins his essay ‘Watchable bodies: Salò's young non-actors’. The scene he describes is from Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma: 1975). In this essay, Rhodes takes issue with the film's supposed anti-eroticism. Whilst the critical consensus has been that there is nothing erotically appealing in this film, Rhodes points out that the standard reception ends up disavowing something rather striking: namely, the fact that in this film there are a number of beautiful boys. ‘Many of us’, Rhodes says, ‘might find the sheer fact of so much nakedness at the film's beginning – its curatorial selection and display of beautiful and nubile flesh – to be (dare I risk saying this?) somewhat arousing or at least titillating.’ Conceived as an allegorical critique of the fascism of consumer capitalism in post-economic-boom Italy, this is a film that features horrific scenes of physical violence and humiliation. For Rhodes, it is precisely the presence of these scenes that is supposed to ‘neutralise’ the erotic appeal of the beautiful young boys. And yet Rhodes argues that Pasolini ‘has chosen his actors precisely because they are attractive – precisely because their bodies will, at least, raise the risk or summon the spectre of our own arousal’. Rhodes seems to suggest here that the anxiety resulting from the possibility that we might desire these bodies – the same bodies that will be sexually exploited and tortured for the pleasure of their executioners – is something that haunts our viewing experience of the film.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Masculinity and Italian CinemaSexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s, pp. 101 - 125Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014