Democracy as Spectacle

[Centexfarmer]

As a volunteer member/moderator of this forum I get to see a lot of things.



And if the Mod Team is doing our jobs right, and we're present when some of these things are happening, few of you actually get to witness them.

I thought that I had created a thread here in CE&P back in 2009 called:

Living in a Culture of Cruelty

I was tipped off by this article by watching a Bill Moyers interview, and at the time I was able to find a copy of this essay on truthout.org.

For some reason it's not there anymore.

So I just took it back to the source, the author himself; Henry A Giroux.

Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle

I'll highlight a few paragraphs that resonated with me for discussion, and y'all find a few then let's discuss those too!

What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?

And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value.

What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance?

This educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state.

A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality; the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big" government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it goes.

There's more much more, but I was impressed by how deftly the author analyzes things within our current "reality" but puts it into a perspective that perhaps we all should at least consider.

When I first read this back in 2009, I thought it was just another "political essay" written about the ills of our political climate.

In rereading it, it's as if he's putting a mirror in front of the faces of the American Electorate, and those who like to feel informed about things and asking us to reevaluate our perspectives.

I apologize for this post being so long, I do know that there are at least a couple of you who will actually read it and respond.

I'm not that interested in how many responses this thread gets, as I am just being able to share a perspective that really changed my views on a lot of things.

Now I'll have to go out and read more about who the author is to determine whether he's "american enough" for the rest of us to pay any attention.






Enjoy, and I look forward to reading what any of you may take from this essay.

 

[kallipolis]

I quote a sentence from Henry Giroux's captioned article:

In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character.

Yes, you are, Mr. Giroux.

The them, and us syndrome conveniently identifies them as the enemy, and we as the chosen people self empowered to sift the wheat, from the chaff.

Life is never so simplistic; nor are people so conveniently packaged, to fit into such a tidy mindset that reveals the good, the bad and the ugly.

 

[Centexfarmer]

I quote a sentence from Henry Giroux's captioned article:

In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character.

Yes, you are, Mr. Giroux.

The them, and us syndrome conveniently identifies them as the enemy, and we as the chosen people self empowered to sift the wheat, from the chaff.

Life is never so simplistic; nor are people so conveniently packaged, to fit into such a tidy mindset that reveals the good, the bad and the ugly.

Isn't that what he's pointing out though?

What he's illustrating in this essay, and how "we" go about doing that?

 

[kallipolis]

Isn't that what he's pointing out though?

What he's illustrating in this essay, and how "we" go about doing that?

Not, according to my reading.

Mr. Giroux is as guilty as are his imaginary enemies (The Republican, advance guard) when so conveniently packaging people into the good, and the bad as he relates to such easy characterisation of the worthiness of his fellow American. Two extremes, representing a mirror image.

Mr. Giroux's has declared war on New Liberalism as represented by the social and religious fundamentalists, of the Republican Party in their crusade to return American to the core values that they say represents the frontier spirit of the early American settler.

I am always impressed, even enthralled by Henry Giroux's well presented opinions but also feel uncomfortable with his easy attempts to divide Americans between them, and us in order to justify his belief that he has a monopoly on all the right remedies that will resolve the problems currently besetting America.

 

[construct]

Let me bring up an example. Early this morning I posted a new thread on IMDb called "The Beauty of Salò. It is on the board for Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom produced by Alberto Grimaldi and directed by Pier Paolo Passolini, a re-imagining of the Marquis de Sade's unfinished novel. Let me reproduce that post as an example of the estheticization of violence that Giroux mentions.

I first saw Salò twenty-five years ago on VHS. I sat there with wide eyes and raised eyebrows hardly believing my eyes and disturbed that I wasn't feeling anything at all. The movie was so cold and the ending so brutal that I hardly knew what to make of it.

Watching it again after all these years, I have a different experience, and I watch it from time to time. Now, I see its beauty, its seductiveness, and it's still cold as ice. The formal composition of each set-up is beautifully austere. The spare decor of the house is beautiful. The victims, the guards, the collaborators, even the story-tellers are beautiful. The costumes are beautiful, and the music is beautiful.

The formal beauty of the movie forbids identification with the characters as surely as its heightened speeches, its worn-out jokes, and its fits of rage. The sparseness of closeups distances the audience from the victims as surely as the lack of back-stories.

The remote, inescapable villa distances the viewer as surely as it numbs the characters. The libertines tell the victims that very few of them will emerge from captivity to live in the magnificent city Salò, but neither the libertines nor the story-tellers say what they also know--no one here will be alive for long. The ally planes are constantly flying overhead. The fall of the Republic is unavoidable and will happen soon. What's left to do?

Well, there are orgies, feasts, drunken philosophizing, tortures, and killings--preferably with as much excitation of the senses as is possible under the circumstances. They also know that enjoyment can only be found in the repetition of what they enjoy. The accounts must be recounted. The sodomy must be repeated. The killings must be repeated--in pretense until they are finally realized. Theirs is the enjoyment of absolute power over others until they themselves become the victims, and if they stay true to their philosophy, they will find joy in that as well.

This distance, this lack of feeling, is as shocking as the horrors that are presented; and the horrors that are presented call complacency to a screeching halt. The movie finally forces its audience to stop and think, not feel but think, about the structure of the society in which we live.

BTW, has anyone actually READ the articles on the bibliography card in the opening credits--Bauvoir, Klossowski, Barthes, Blanchot, the rest?

This post was a reaction to the tenor of the board as a whole, which see. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073650/board.

The vast majority on the board took the movie to be either a horror movie or a gross-out movie and judged it by those standards. It was placed in company either with Saw and Hostel or with Pink Flamingos. It should really be placed in company with A Clockwork Orange.

Giroux says that he is "not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character," and he isn't. However, he is making a judgment from his analysis.

The article is filled with rhetoric that I've only ever found in people (like me) who have been thoroughly drenched in French Postmodernism. Specifically, he's been reading Guy de Bord, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. Perhaps he picked up his rhetoric second-hand, but that's where it comes from. Their predecesors were the people in Passolini's bibliography for Salò--Barthes, Banchot, Klossowski, and the rest. These guys' agendas (and they may have one or two) is buried so deep that it is seldom apparent on the surface.

I need to get to an appointment right now, but I want to address the problem, if it is a problem, of dropping the mask of objectivity for a praxis of advocacy. I'd like to ask whether the rhetoric of cruelty can be used subversively. I think it can. I think Stanley Kubrick did exactly that in A Clockwork Orange, and I think Passolini did it in Salò.

I'm going to pause here. I need to get ready for an appointment, but I will return to all this--both Giroux's article and esthetics and semiotics as they relate to ethics--if they do.

 

[kallipolis]

Let me bring up an example. Early this morning I posted a new thread on IMDb called "The Beauty of Salò. It is on the board for Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom produced by Alberto Grimaldi and directed by Pier Paolo Passolini, a re-imagining of the Marquis de Sade's unfinished novel. Let me reproduce that post as an example of the estheticization of violence that Giroux mentions.



This post was a reaction to the tenor of the board as a whole, which see. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073650/board.

The vast majority on the board took the movie to be either a horror movie or a gross-out movie and judged it by those standards. It was placed in company either with Saw and Hostel or with Pink Flamingos. It should really be placed in company with A Clockwork Orange.

Giroux says that he is "not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character," and he isn't. However, he is making a judgment from his analysis.

The article is filled with rhetoric that I've only ever found in people (like me) who have been thoroughly drenched in French Postmodernism. Specifically, he's been reading Guy de Bord, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. Perhaps he picked up his rhetoric second-hand, but that's where it comes from. Their predecesors were the people in Passolini's bibliography for Salò--Barthes, Banchot, Klossowski, and the rest. These guys' agendas (and they may have one or two) is buried so deep that it is seldom apparent on the surface.

I need to get to an appointment right now, but I want to address the problem, if it is a problem, of dropping the mask of objectivity for a praxis of advocacy. I'd like to ask whether the rhetoric of cruelty can be used subversively. I think it can. I think Stanley Kubrick did exactly that in A Clockwork Orange, and I think Passolini did it in Salò.

I'm going to pause here. I need to get ready for an appointment, but I will return to all this--both Giroux's article and esthetics and semiotics as they relate to ethics--if they do.

IMHO Giroux's approach fails to illustrate the rhetoric of cruelty rather reminds me that agenda driven polemics continues to lead Giroux's appeal for those who believe that the political matrix is a matter between us and them.

I agree that Kubrick's prophetic work of art used the rhetoric of cruelty to project a shocking view of the future that has tragically come to pass.

On the other hand Pasonlini's Salo was yet another attempt by this Marxist Leninist director to continue his vendetta against Italy's Neo Fascists, who in 1975 were re-emerging as an influential political force at a time when the Red Brigades had plunged Italy into a state of terror aimed at destabilising the Italian state.

There is every reason to believe that Pasolini's demise in November 1975 at the hands of a rent boy was much more than it appeared to be. The murderer was eventually released from prison after serving his sentence still maintaining that he was solely responsible.

As an enthusiastic fan of Pasolini's works of art I was very disappointed by Salo and very much annoyed that this great master of cinema failed to recognise that Italy wanted, and needed to move on from the divisions that were created during the Fascist era.

I may also add that after viewing Salo, for the first time I chose to read De Sade's 120 days in Sodom and once again realised that neither the film, or the book appealed to my artistic appreciation.

Kubrick succeeded in his visionary work of art. Using Malcolm McDowell was also inspirational when one considers McDowell's performance in the revolutionary If which preceded Clockwork Orange by three years and is as powerful a testament of the rhetoric of cruelty being played out within the framework of an establishment institution.

In its appropriate place the rhetoric of cruelty can be instrumental in driving home an unpleasant truth for those whose comfort zone needs to be disturbed.

 

[construct]

Yes, kalipolis, you are right that Passolini had a partisan political agenda. Grimaldi probably did as well. Look at what else he produced. Not only that, but the French post-structuralists I've already mentioned were working with a similar frame of reference. If anything, that points up my suggestion that the rhetoric of cruelty can be used subversively. I note in passing the difference with Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento (also produced by Girmaldi).

Now, I don't think that rhetoric is being used subversively on CE&P. It's my judgment that the harsh tone one finds here from the left is a simple mirroring of what is produced by the right. It is reactionary and perhaps even counter-productive.

I'm simply taking issue with Giroux's univocal and negative valorization of the rhetoric of cruelty. Passolini's depiction of the dull repetition of vice is a depiction of dehumanized commodification of what should be valorized but is not. I think that speaks beyond the problem of the emergence of neo-fascism in Italy in the mid-1970s. I think it speaks to the banality implicit in capitalism in America today. Salò ends with the Duke and the President taking turns viewing from their upstairs window the tortures and executions in the courtyard below. The screams of the victims and the laughter of the executioners are not even on the soundtrack. Victims and executioners alike have become mere commodities. We have no point of relationship with them because we know almost nothing about any of them--despite having spent two hours of our lives with them in the villa. Even though they have names, we have no more investment in them than we have in their captors who have mere titles.

Since you brought it up, Passolini's Salò has an entirely different method and goal from Sade's 120 Days. There is no irony in Sade, not even a little. He is writing against Rousseau by pushing natural law theory to its limits through a pornography of excess. Nothing is big enough, nothing is ferocious enough, nothing is complex enough to satisfy the destructive force of nature. Sade's repetition is preserved by Passolini but to very different ends.

Giroux takes issue with the commodification of human life. Suffering is made acceptable by dehumanization. He mentions in passing the Jerry Springer Show. That's not bad. I'll do him one better. How about the YouTube video reactions to 3 Men 1 Hammer? Let me run and hunt one down that I can post to show the group what I'm talking about.

 

[laikaNYC]

SALO, which is one of Pasolini’s few films in which he dealt with homosexuality: What, if anything, are we to make of the fact that he presented it [homosexuality] in terms of rape and child sexual abuse, as a power trip in which these tyrants play out their disguting fantasies with helpless young boys as their toys? Is it some kind of bizarre confessional or merely an assault on the depths to which Fascism can sink? Pasolini offers no obvious moral... he merely rubs his audience’s nose in filth and wallows in the sensationalism.

 

[BostonPirate]

Thanks for the thread Centex.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams, in Defense of the British Soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre, 1770

Men must be ready, they must pride themselves and be happy to sacrifice their private pleasures, passions and interests, nay, their private friendships and dearest connections, when they stand in competition with the rights of society.
John Adams, letter to Mercy Warren, April 16, 1776

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

America has lost her way, I think.

The current GOP wants the need to care for the weak, the infirm and unfortunate depicted as a weakness, and as unamerican.

It is a lie.

Not only have we in the past exerted this need for our own, but we did so for the globe. NOW? Its a simple spending issue?

Bullshit.

America needs to care for all of its own in basic ways, and I think this paragraph from the essay speaks to my point better than I could...

....a pedagogy of hate has become a crucial element providing numerous platforms for a culture of cruelty and is fundamental to how we understand the role of education in a range of sites outside of traditional forms of schooling. This educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state. Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks."

I just want to know when we are going to change the inscription on the statue of liberty from...

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

to

Fuck the poor, the sick and the illegals, they cost too much.

 

[Telstra]

"Democracy as Spectacle"
It is a spectacle. It is about rudeness and uncaring again.

Most city people are much ruder country people ?

 

[rareboy]

I think that for a few years now, there has been a shift in American and Canadian politics toward creating the culture of cruelty that is based on that tight lipped puritanical idea that compassion is a useless weakness in society.

Whereas the Victorians could be exhorted to do good works for the poor during their weekly hour in a hard pew, it is less likely today that the churches have the same kind of impact.

Television, movies and music have become the battleground for exploring the ideas of kindness and thoughtless charity versus the grasping me-first greed that has become the hallmark of the North American society.

So when I hear or read of the support for notions of not providing housing or healthcare or even food as being noble and morally just, it always reminds me that the greatest cruelty is often neglect and the greatest evil is just the banality of everyday acts of de-humanizing whoever it is that you perceive as the enemy at the gates.

Certainly, the day that the US decided that not only would it employ torture but would re-brand it, I think that part of my soul died, because what had been unspoken suddenly became explicit.

But the debate it stirred was worthwhile.

And oddly enough, this is what occurred to me as I watched the clips from the Video Game that led to the Supreme Court decision. It was the seeming banality of a woman literally being ripped in half with her guts pouring out that caught my attention. That it may be against the law for little Johnny to see sexual intimacy portrayed, but fine for a 14 year old kid to think that it is perfectly acceptable to see the dismemberment and torture of female characters in a game.

What does this tell us about the nature of America today?

It can't just be a free speech thing or else every kid would be able to view sexual pornography from the time they are able to use the remote or go online.

Over a 20 year period, it seems as though the world is more corrosive and groomed to enjoy cruelty in all its forms.

And yet, in opposition, there is the ability for millions more to have their voices heard in opposition to it and through social networking, to make much of it stop.

Do I think that the modern world will backslide to the point of barbarism? some days, I think it might take very little to push humanity over the precipice again when I see the way that gays, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities are so easily targeted.

And I'm thinking about all of this in the context of Passolini now as well. And Laika's perspective on the work is particularly illuminating.

 

[BostonPirate]

SALO, which is one of Pasolini’s few films in which he dealt with homosexuality: What, if anything, are we to make of the fact that he presented it [homosexuality] in terms of rape and child sexual abuse, as a power trip in which these tyrants play out their disguting fantasies with helpless young boys as their toys? Is it some kind of bizarre confessional or merely an assault on the depths to which Fascism can sink? Pasolini offers no obvious moral... he merely rubs his audience’s nose in filth and wallows in the sensationalism.

Laika?

That's called plaigarism

This homophobic defense would sound laughable if not for SALO, which is one is one of Pasolini’s few films in which he dealt with homosexuality: What, if anything, are we to make of the fact that he presented it in terms of rape and child sexual abuse, as a power trip in which decadent authoritarians play out their disguting fantasies with helpless young boys as their toys? Is it some kind of bizarre confessional or merely a stinging assault on the depths to which Fascism can sink? Pasolini offers no obvious moral; he merely rubs his audience’s collective nose in filth.

http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2008/08/borderland-salo-1975/

almost verbatim, actually...

 

[construct]

SALO, which is one of Pasolini’s few films in which he dealt with homosexuality: What, if anything, are we to make of the fact that he presented it [homosexuality] in terms of rape and child sexual abuse, as a power trip in which these tyrants play out their disguting fantasies with helpless young boys as their toys? Is it some kind of bizarre confessional or merely an assault on the depths to which Fascism can sink? Pasolini offers no obvious moral... he merely rubs his audience’s nose in filth and wallows in the sensationalism.

Thanks for (not) calling my attention to my misspelling. You're right; it's got only one 's.'

Well, I certainly don't think the movie is confessional. Some of the actors have reported in interviews that Pasolini was professional if not brusque on the set. It was only after one of the girls complained that Pasonlini wasn't giving the kids any attention that he took her out for lunch or a soda or something and actually talked to her about what was going on with her in her life.

I think your second suggestion is closer to the truth: "merely an assault on the depths to which Fascism can sink." But I'm not sure it's completely fair to say that he "rubs his audience's nose in filth and wallows in the sensationalism" either. You really didn't notice how much of the movie is long static shots, did you? The close-ups are shocking because they are so few and far between. It's off-putting not because it brings you close in. It's off-putting because the camera mostly statically gazes allowing the architecture of the room to direct your eyes to the center of the screen. There's not much wallowing here.

And I'll repeat something I said before. There's not much sensation here either. There's no sentiment. There's no identification. There's no feeling. The word 'rites' comes up at several points in the film as something that the captors and the story-tellers value. What Pasolini is showing us is rites, repetitions, ceremonies, scenes, not feelings.

What he is showing is how fungible individuals are. The victims have names--Franco, Eva, Albertina, Sergio--but they have almost no histories. And the captors have no names; they have vices, but they are mere representations of their societal positions. This is what I mean by commodification.

I hope this discussion of Salò sheds more light on Giroux's discussion of dehumanization (commodification of the person) under the regime of American capitalism.

 

[construct]

Laika?

That's called plaigarism




http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2008/08/borderland-salo-1975/

almost verbatim, actually...

Good catch!

BTW, the victims are girls and boys in equal numbers, and the degradations are heterosexual at least as often as they are homosexual. And I have, in fact, sat through a couple of traditional grindhouse exploitation double features.

Oh, and kallipolis's comparison with Lindsay Anderson's If . . . . is apropos.

 

[ThreeCrows]

Laika?

That's called plaigarism

http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2008/08/borderland-salo-1975/

almost verbatim, actually...

HAHAHA - awesome.

 

[BostonPirate]

I noted that his response was particularly illuminating......

It was so clearly beyond his demonstrated capacity for analysis and insight based on the other juvenile responses in different threads...

And not a particularly intelligent or sophisticated review to plagiarize either.

Unless....omg....perhaps he was the author of this ham fisted review in the first place?????

Is this how the kids are getting through skool these daze?

This is the Author and he doesn't look like Laika.

Steve Biodrowski

Cinefantastique's Los Angeles Correspondent from 1987 to 1993 and West Coast Editor from 1993 to 1999. Currently the webmaster of Cinefantastique Online, I also run a website called Hollywood Gothique that covers Halloween Horror and Sci-Fi Cinema Events in the Los Angeles area.

http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/author/admin/

SO

THis is relevant if you read the article.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a "symbiosis of suffering and spectacle."

The concept of education has been replaced with a cut and paste mentality... that out there someone has the right idea and that emulation of it is cool.. .is justification for cruelty.

When americans think for themselves again the issues brought up in this artlicle will resonate.

When education is a dirty word, and universities are lampooned as the bastions of liberalism, the concept of free thinking dies.

 

[construct]

I promised you guys a video, so here it is--another example of commodification. It's long, but you don't have to watch the whole thing to get the point. Hell, you may not have to watch any of it. I may have made my point already. (I had to go through several of these vids 'cause a lot of them are from kids.)



Now, I said I wanted to talk about dropping the mask of objectivity. While I think that analytical description and abstract theorizing may help us understand our situation, it shouldn't preclude praxis. Ones experience in putting the theory into practice needs to be used in reviewing the theory. This looped process refines both theory and practice. The idea that description and theory should be somehow "objective" is simply wrong. If it's of any use, it won't be "objective." One must exercise ones judging faculty in order to decide what actions to take. Often those judgments will be partisan. It will have an agonistic or even antagonistic structure, and I'm not sure that I really understand why kallipolis seems to find something objectionable in that.

That doesn't mean that matters of power and politics must be collapsed into the discourse of character. Judgment need not be about the particular people. It may stay on the level of policy. Giroux's article doesn't say an unkind word about Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage, for example, but it does criticize their role in the creation of a culture of violence. There are moral judgments to be drawn, but they are primarily moral judgments about ourselves and about the way we see our society behaving and changing.

 

[rareboy]

^ ^No Cinefantastique guy is smiling. So we know it can't be the same grim person.

 

[construct]

When education is a dirty word, and universities are lampooned as the bastions of liberalism, the concept of free thinking dies.

Or as the article would have it, education moves out of the home and the classroom into a depersonalizing world. The Michael Savages and the Rush Limbaughs, the Jerry Springers and Hostel and commercials and eBaum's World become the educators.

 

[kallipolis]

Yes, kalipolis, you are right that Passolini had a partisan political agenda. Grimaldi probably did as well. Look at what else he produced. Not only that, but the French post-structuralists I've already mentioned were working with a similar frame of reference. If anything, that points up my suggestion that the rhetoric of cruelty can be used subversively. I note in passing the difference with Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento (also produced by Girmaldi).

Now, I don't think that rhetoric is being used subversively on CE&P. It's my judgment that the harsh tone one finds here from the left is a simple mirroring of what is produced by the right. It is reactionary and perhaps even counter-productive.

I'm simply taking issue with Giroux's univocal and negative valorization of the rhetoric of cruelty. Passolini's depiction of the dull repetition of vice is a depiction of dehumanized commodification of what should be valorized but is not. I think that speaks beyond the problem of the emergence of neo-fascism in Italy in the mid-1970s. I think it speaks to the banality implicit in capitalism in America today. Salò ends with the Duke and the President taking turns viewing from their upstairs window the tortures and executions in the courtyard below. The screams of the victims and the laughter of the executioners are not even on the soundtrack. Victims and executioners alike have become mere commodities. We have no point of relationship with them because we know almost nothing about any of them--despite having spent two hours of our lives with them in the villa. Even though they have names, we have no more investment in them than we have in their captors who have mere titles.

Since you brought it up, Passolini's Salò has an entirely different method and goal from Sade's 120 Days. There is no irony in Sade, not even a little. He is writing against Rousseau by pushing natural law theory to its limits through a pornography of excess. Nothing is big enough, nothing is ferocious enough, nothing is complex enough to satisfy the destructive force of nature. Sade's repetition is preserved by Passolini but to very different ends.

Giroux takes issue with the commodification of human life. Suffering is made acceptable by dehumanization. He mentions in passing the Jerry Springer Show. That's not bad. I'll do him one better. How about the YouTube video reactions to 3 Men 1 Hammer? Let me run and hunt one down that I can post to show the group what I'm talking about.

Novecento is also a political statement woven into a work of art that handsomely rewards us with an appealing masterpiece that speaks to Italy's feudal system being obliged to face changing fortunes.

Il Gattopardo relates to the revolutionary period of the Risorgimento and the attempts of the Sicilian aristocracy to weather the storm of changing times. A film worth watching for the political angle and also for the beauty of the cinematography.

I have often felt that films which use shock value to drive home their agenda fail simply because the shocking scenes are so powerful that they divert attention from the real message which the film attempts to convey. The decline, and fall of the Italian Social Republic was one of moral decay rather than foregone military defeat as a result of being a German puppet state.

The immediate post war years of Italian neo realism cinema was probably much more successful in influencing its audiences, for the good of the Italian people than did Pasolini, when attempting to restage the fall of the Italian Social Republic, on terms that addressed his prejudices.

I lived in Italy for four years enjoying my post graduate work in an atmosphere of heavenly beauty that cannot be described in words, only felt and lived as a free spirit should live their life. Pasolini's films came very close to describing my own feelings for the Italian way of life. Salo was the one exception.