Hungry gazes, digesting closeups: Pasolini, Porcile and the politics of consumption

Abstract

In his last interview, held on the occasion of the French release of his film Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Pier Paolo Pasolini was asked if cannibalism was political. He answered that cannibalism was a political fact that was real in certain contexts and metaphorical in others. In answer to the next question – whether cannibalism was the best way to free oneself of political enemies – he replied with two modest proposals he had recently made, in the style of Jonathan Swift: yes, when it came to the devouring of school teachers and of Italian television directors. It was a provocative answer to a provocative question, and a significant form of closure to both a public trajectory and an oeuvre in which consumption had played a key metaphorical role. While Pasolini the public man wrote about the consumer society and defined it as a new kind of fascism, he shot films in which the eating of potatoes or of another human had a narrative relevance. The two actions, consumption and consumerism, were not unrelated, and he made numerous rich reflections on the links between them throughout his career, the most important of these being the feature film Porcile/Pigsty (1969).