If one overdoses on the irony of dialectical transformation of transgression into law, resistance into power, one ends up short-circuiting the dialectical process, left with a bleak conclusion at which Pasolini arrived by repudiating The _Trilogy of Life_:
Gary Indiana writes:
***** The films in The _Trilogy of Life_ proceed from texts that mark the beginning of vernacular languages. Each celebrates the vivid, bawdy, erotic life of the medieval world, the life of the barnyard, the caravanserai, the voyage of trade. The naked human body is really the star of these movies, a challenge to the hierarchy of film images that divides 'tasteful' nudity and eroticism from 'pornography', or from the more generous range of representations permitted in painting, sculpture and literature. Pasolini presents nakedness with a _faux-naivete_ endorsed by the canonical status of the trilogy's literary sources, a readymade defence against innumerable indecency charges brought against the films in Italy.
While making _Salo_, Pasolini wrote a repudiation of the trilogy, which prefaced the book in which their screenplays were collected, and later appeared as a posthumous final column for _Corriere della Sera_, Italy's leading daily newspaper. (The columns were later collected as _Lutheran Letters_.) In the repudiation, he says that
"during the first phase of the cultural and anthropological crisis which began towards the end of the sixties -- in which the unreality of the subculture of the mass media and therefore of mass communication began to reign supreme -- the last bulwark of reality seemed to be 'innocent' bodies with the archaic, dark, vital violence of their sexual organs."
However, 'all that has been turned upside down':
"First: the progressive struggle for democratization of expression and for sexual liberation has been brutally superseded and cancelled out by the decision of the consumerist power to grant a tolerance as vast as it is false. Secondly: even the 'reality' of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, enslaved by consumerist power -- indeed such violence to human bodies has become the most macroscopic fact of the new human epoch."
Pasolini develops these ideas with great force, in a few pages, with somewhat strained logic; 'the degeneration of bodies and sex organs has assumed a retroactive character', he writes. In effect, the bodies of the present, used to portray bodies in the narrative past, corrupted as the 'present' bodies are by consumerist society, 'means that they were already so potentially' -- if I follow this correctly, the naked youths in the _actual_ past, represented by naked actors in the present, were already 'degenerated', _if they could come to exemplify degeneracy in the future_. To quote Pasolini further:
"if today they are human garbage it means that they were potentially the same _then_; so they were imbeciles forced to be adorable; solid criminals forced to be pathetic; useless, vile creatures forced to be innocent and saintly, etc. The collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past. Life is a heap of insignificant and ironical ruins."
He couldn't continue making films like the trilogy, Pasolini claims, even if he wanted to, 'because now I hate the bodies and the sex organs'.
(endnotes omitted, Gary Indiana, _Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom_, London: British Film Institute, 2000, pp. 28-29) *****
If Pasolini's ideological investment in innocent bodies was tragically naive (if productive of great art), his violent repudiation of the past was even more so. The collapse of the present doesn't imply the collapse of the past, unless one short-circuits the dialectic, tempting as it may be to conclude that if X has become Y, X must have been always already Y from the very beginning, at least potentially. History is much more contingent than that. That we are beaten today doesn't mean that we were doomed to lose & struggles of the past were merely "a heap of insignificant and ironical ruins." By collapsing the past into "ironical ruins," we end up voluntarily ceding more power to the ruling class. Hindsight granted by history can, instead, allow us to become generous toward the past, but that means we have to let go of value judgments reduced to "innocent versus degenerate" in which all condemnations of "consumerism" are rooted.
Yoshie