1. Finals
2. Being sick
3. Watching Salò
So I'd be willing to go ahead and say that all three at once is triple-hard. And it's true.
I first saw Salò in high school for more or less the same reasons I read Lolita in 8th grade: I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Lolita was beautiful, mesmerizing, forever rewarding. Salò made me vomit. Literally.
It's not a bad movie. The director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was an excellent director and extremely smart. He knew exactly what he was doing and he did it better than anyone else before or since. And I am including in this:
Alfred Hitchcock, for Psycho and Rear Window
The Creators of The Blair Witch Project
Tod Browning for Freaks
Gore Verbinski for The Ring
Michael Powell for Peeping Tom
Michael Haneke for Funny Games
. . . among others. These are all great films. Scary, moving, thought-provoking. They all, in some way or another, have to do with watching. The consequences of watching, of being a voyeur. Haneke gets pretty meta with it, but they're all, in a way, a statement on the role an audience plays. That is, if these terrible things happening on screen are so terrible, why are you watching it?
With Salò, Pasolini took that idea and made a movie that is the ultimate test in how-much-can-you-standness.
Rape, murder, eating feces (own and other's), eating food laced with nails, nipples and penises being burned off, tongues cut out . . . all of this is in Salò. And I mean IN Salò. In front of you. Pasolini doesn't turn the camera away when he's supposed to. You want to watch what he produced? Then fine, you're going to fucking watch it.
It's brilliant, the way he takes film to a new level this way. So smart. And after 34 years no one's come close to touching him. And it lends itself to feminist film theory, which focuses so much on scopophilia, of voyeurism, of women being watched by men. Which in turn lends itself to be a perfect candidate for my final paper in Literary Criticism, which is why I proposed this topic, a feminist critique of Salò, to my professor weeks ago to much enthusiasm.
And it's why it's so hard to write. I'm sick. Whatever I have, a cold I think, has made my gag reflex go berserk with sensitivity. I can't watch Salò for more than ten minutes at a time without salivating in preparation for vomit.
Which makes this paper particularly difficult. In 24 hours it WILL be written. It WILL be turned in. Finals WILL be over. I WILL be free for weeks.
But right now, I'm just being mad at Pasolini and trying to write about Salò from memory as much as possible.
I first saw Salò in high school for more or less the same reasons I read Lolita in 8th grade: I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Lolita was beautiful, mesmerizing, forever rewarding. Salò made me vomit. Literally.
It's not a bad movie. The director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was an excellent director and extremely smart. He knew exactly what he was doing and he did it better than anyone else before or since. And I am including in this:
Alfred Hitchcock, for Psycho and Rear Window
The Creators of The Blair Witch Project
Tod Browning for Freaks
Gore Verbinski for The Ring
Michael Powell for Peeping Tom
Michael Haneke for Funny Games
. . . among others. These are all great films. Scary, moving, thought-provoking. They all, in some way or another, have to do with watching. The consequences of watching, of being a voyeur. Haneke gets pretty meta with it, but they're all, in a way, a statement on the role an audience plays. That is, if these terrible things happening on screen are so terrible, why are you watching it?
With Salò, Pasolini took that idea and made a movie that is the ultimate test in how-much-can-you-standness.
Rape, murder, eating feces (own and other's), eating food laced with nails, nipples and penises being burned off, tongues cut out . . . all of this is in Salò. And I mean IN Salò. In front of you. Pasolini doesn't turn the camera away when he's supposed to. You want to watch what he produced? Then fine, you're going to fucking watch it.
It's brilliant, the way he takes film to a new level this way. So smart. And after 34 years no one's come close to touching him. And it lends itself to feminist film theory, which focuses so much on scopophilia, of voyeurism, of women being watched by men. Which in turn lends itself to be a perfect candidate for my final paper in Literary Criticism, which is why I proposed this topic, a feminist critique of Salò, to my professor weeks ago to much enthusiasm.
And it's why it's so hard to write. I'm sick. Whatever I have, a cold I think, has made my gag reflex go berserk with sensitivity. I can't watch Salò for more than ten minutes at a time without salivating in preparation for vomit.
Which makes this paper particularly difficult. In 24 hours it WILL be written. It WILL be turned in. Finals WILL be over. I WILL be free for weeks.
But right now, I'm just being mad at Pasolini and trying to write about Salò from memory as much as possible.
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