Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

I've written about his films at length before.

Salo is my favorite film of all time.

I've also written about Teorema and Porceal, which kind of form an unofficial trilogy.

And this film almost brought me to tears.

Everything is that color, and it just gets very... oppressive and then it creates this later contrast when we finally meet the third mother superior and she's more in a her outfit has more frills to it and she wears a lot more jewelry and it's like a lavender color to her robes versus what the other younger nuns are wearing and it just immediately creates this contrast because we've gotten so accustomed to seafoam green that she's in lavender you immediately know she has like a beauty mark too that there's something a little extravagant about just from how she looks, she immediately stands out and is going to have a different personality from these other two mother superiors that we've met.

That's a very excellent point about about the way color is presented because it's, the color kind of almost makes me think of some of Pasolini's color techniques.

Suppose Salo from the Trilogy of Life.

In the Trilogy of Life, you know, there's Cameron, the Canterbury Tales, and the Arabian Nights.

So...

Before there was movies like Hostel and Martyrs and the Guinea Pig series and the August Underground series and lurking in the wake of movies like Sallow or 120 Days of Sodom and what else? The films of Herschel Gordon-Lewis.

there was a movie called blood sucking freaks.

Okay.

Oh yeah, the Marquis de Sade.

And then all I could think of was the movie Salo.

And I was like, yeah, this could be an alternative soundtrack for the... movie sallow right about the same time that they forced the peasants to eat sandwiches filled with um great movie dave if you've never seen it watch it um you can also play over like any of the guinea pig movies as well it's a kind of really I'm not suggesting the band should move into soundtrack creation here, but there is that kind of snuff, I don't know if what I'm watching here is actually someone being decapitated or it's not a movie.

I mean that in the nicest possible way.

And this makes him an outsider.

And, and in the book, uh, maybe you, you remember the stories of the Salo and the Eurotvi.

These are similar figures in the Eastern and Byzantine and then in the Russian Orthodox churches, who are also, uh, they, they act like mad- madmen, but they, uh, act like madmen with a, with a claim that they act on behalf of God and resist the worldly order, because the world since, uh, the, in, in, in their belief, since, uh, the, the, the, uh, since the death of Christ and the redemption of the world, this world doesn't mean anything anymore.

Time doesn't mean anything anymore.

The world is saved, and we, and humankind lives in the state of grace, and all the time is actually a waste of time.

This is why the, they, the world, because the world doesn't mean anything, they resist the world, and that makes him, makes the, the, the idiota of the Latin Catholic Church and the Eurotvi and the Salos of the Byzantine and Russian Orthodox Church, uh, that powerful figure of, of the outsider and the difference between the fool and the madman is, uh, is, in my perspective, that idiota really tries to cut every, every connection to the world as it exists.

The madman Is, is an aberration in a way.

The fool, uh, and the, and the court jester, they turn things upside down, but they, they, they do play that game for a limited period of time.

Yeah, especially amongst, like, cinephiles online.

Like, it becomes, like, the joke of, like, whenever someone, you think of the most fucked up movie you can think of for a punchline of, like, oh, date night idea, watch Salo or whatever.

And the other reason I compare it to Two Girls, One Cup is that even though I hadn't seen it, I know it involves poop.

And for the record, I still have not seen Two Girls, One Cup, and I don't want to watch

Like, I was getting really freaked out.

Lily sent, the night of, she sent us, like, a slayful, like, selfie of herself.

I was like, about to watch Salo.

20 minutes later, she's like, guys, I have to tap out.

I don't want any part of anything like this ever again.

I would watch Salo again before I'd watch this thing.

Wow, all right.

Okay, so that's where we're at.

Well, actually,

Salo was Nazi craziness in Italy.

Yeah, yeah, and you just sit there going, what happened to those people? What happened to the

germs? So some people fought against it, not many.

in a good mood or yeah like you said with the kids and stuff but yeah it's definitely worth a watch I mean it's been on my list for so long I've seen so many I've never even

heard of it

I've seen so many it's one of those film nerd things so many film nerds will sit and talk about it and go you know it's like the film Brick or Session 9 you know it's just one of those film nerd films and again like Salo and then someone goes and I just thought to myself everyone's going it's literally the most atrocious thing in regards to the horrors of war it's all true but I was like Yeah, you've got to do a pod on something like that.

Something, something, Werner Herzog.

So I'll just, yeah.

Yeah, just to follow on real quick with, with what you said, uh, Hans, people go check out the show we did on the Epstein Files about Salo, because it fits right into that, and that's all about Marquis de Sade.

And it's interesting you said that because in my slides, I literally have stuff about Marquis de Sade and, uh, some of the stuff that Epstein's talking about.

But this is maybe one of the, the interesting pictures.

That's literally Epstein talking in probably a private thing.

It seems like this is like he's talking to one of his girl victims or something like that.

So he knew de Sade, which ties into, um, ties into Salo.

Have you read Ada or Ardor? That's Nabokov.

The murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the greats of Italian cinema, one of the best directors.

And the more I thought about that story, the more I realised that I could set a thriller inside the world of him making his last film, Fellini making the fabulous Casanova.

And...

That didn't have to be the central event.

Even as things start to become more complicated, there's still this sort of ongoing pulse of love right to the last moment.

Yeah.

There is this year in their lives, we build up also to the murder of Pasolini, and thematically, I want to come back again, you've already touched on it really, this contradiction between a filmmaker making Casanova with all its sexual liberation and sexual abandon, and yet what was happening in the 1970s in Rome, where they are in situ, what was happening, what would have been happening in the lives of particularly of Nicola's.

There's an awful lot happening in Rome in that period.