Page 85 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

72 Nightmare Japan

revolutionary spirit of the notorious French author’s pornographic satires.
For Coniam, Pasolini’s film differs from Angela Carter’s interpretation of
de Sade’s magnum opus as the work of ‘a sexual guerilla whose purpose
is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute
sexuality as a primary mode of being’ (Carter 2001: 21-2). Likewise, it
fails to understand de Sade’s tales as fictions set in purposefully
ambiguous locales and populated by exaggerated grotesques that
nonetheless invite readers to indulge ‘in irresponsible, undeserved
license’ (Coniam 2001: 128). As Coniam correctly notes, Pasolini’s film
is ‘the complete negation of every idea that Sade ever put on paper’
(129). As Coniam states, ‘[w]hat Pasolini has in fact done [in Salò] is take
de Sade’s fantasies and not only made them “real” but made them
answerable, by locating them in actual historical experience’ (128):

Pasolini’s Sadeans have their own faces, while Sade’s inevitably have the face
of the reader. And further, they all look ordinary; rather ugly, stupid and weak.
Thus Pasolini denies us any vicarious endorsement of their pleasures; the very
effect that Sade wants and encourages. (129)

Thus, virtually eliminated from Pasolini’s Salò is de Sade’s rejection of
not only a plurality of political arrangements, including totalitarianism
and fascism, but also the multiplicity of potential sexualities and sexual
conjunctions including, even as they most blatantly exceed, most
conventional notions of eroticism frequently deployed in the service of
that most insidious of all masquerades: heteronormativity.
These differences between de Sade’s libertines and Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s all-too-human metaphors for the genocidal cruelties of 1940s
Italy are important to note, especially when it comes to the orgiastic
possibilities imbedded in Sato Hisayasu’s Muscle. As one of the hustlers
attending the climactic masquerade at Lunatic Theater remarks to
Ryuzaki, ‘[e]verything is an illusion…like in the movies.’ Indeed, films
by directors eager to relegate meaning to simple binary models (for
example: Salo’s libertines as embodiments of Fascist ideologies; the
bodies of the victimised men and women as metaphors for the targets of
genocide) can limit experience. It is for just this reason that Muscle’s
action unfolds either outside of movie theatres or in front of empty movie