A Roman Crime of Passion

"'What son of a bitch dumped this shit in front of my place?' ...it seemed a pile of filthy rags. But it was a man. Dead."

"When I saw him I wished I was a journalist. To be able to describe the emotion I felt seeing Pier Paolo Pasolini dead, on the ground, at that hour, in that place, and in that sickeningly mutilated state."

The rescue squad mopped up the remains of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 52 years old, poet, filmmaker, and social agitator, from the ruts of the dirt road in the early hours of Sunday, November 2nd. By that afternoon, all Rome knew that one of her most famous artists-in-residence had been found mangled in the midst of the slums of Ostia, a Roman suburb, on a strip of earth between huts of corrugated tin. That he had been beaten to death in a brawl with a (male) prostitute, a seventeen-year-old streetwalker. Monday Rome was in an uproar. L'Unita, the paper of the Paritito Communista Italiano (PCI) glorified Pasolini the poet; "Il Tempo," the paper of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, the neofascist party) vilified Pasolini the homosexual. Posters proclaimed the martyrdom of a radical poet.

But neither the event nor the man involved were accurately perceived by those who saw Pasolini as a radical Communist and a great poet, or who saw his murder as a martyrdom. Pasolini was not terribly progressive, as compared with other Italian Communist poets such as Elio Vittorini, or Cesare Pavese. Pasolini's books denounced the social problems he saw around him; in "Ragazzi di Vita" ("Beach Boys of the City" and "Vita Violenta" ("Violent Life"), his two best-known prose works, he decried the barriers of class in contemporary Italy, the profound social divisions between regions, cities, even neighborhoods. His polemics against corruption, injustice, and violence at all levels of society have been compared to Zola's work; Pasolini, like Zola in his time, saw in the "ragazzi di vita," who have neither ideals nor morals, a mirror image of the capitalist bourgeois who wield power in Italy. But Pasolini proposed no alternative to the existing power structure. Though he professed commuunism, Pasolini was no Marxist or Maoist, but a utopian, a romantic. His vision of the future society was of a "natural" society, a return to some pastoral arcadia (such as the one his early poems describe, inspired by the gentle countryside near Friuli). Taking refuge in literature, Pasolini found only intellectual answers to the economic and political questions his social conscience posed. His artistic sensibility searched out paradoxes, parallels, aesthetically pleasing statements (e.g., "we have come to the end of pity"). But a true social reformer cannot afford to let ethical problems become aesthetic attitudes. Though the PCI tried to claim Pasolini after his death, his true political orientation was conservative, even reactionary.

As Pasolini's intellectualism influenced his politics and kept him from adopting a stance that was really progressive (and-or practical), so his political conscience interferred with his artistic development, pushing his work further and further towards simplistic allegory. His early pastoral poetry hardened into a black-and-white vision in his later works. Le Cenere di Gramsci written in the early fifties, already sees the world divided between an innocent proletariat (an urbanized "noble savage") and an evil, decadent bourgeoisie. His prose development follows a similar pattern; a growing rigidity of perception is apparent when one compares "Ragazzi di vita" (also written in the fifties) to "La Divina Mimesis," a parody of the Divine Comedy he was working on at his death. Pasolini always wrote in parables, but in his later work his symbols become estranged from any reality. "The Divine Mimesis" is full of wornout catchphrases of the Italian left; the souls Pasolini-Dante meets in his Inferno are "conformisti piccolo-borghesi" (petit-bourgeois conformists), and their sins are "il conformismo," "la volgarita," "la moralita." Pasolini always had a fondness for the antithesis, for the oxymoron; but in his recent writings the language degenerates into phrases that are cliches before they are coined: "the masses have chosen as their religion the condition of not having one, without knowing," vulgarity is the full bloom of conformity," or "this banal originality." Pasolini owed his fame as a poet to the fact that he appeared on the Italian literary stage at a time when there were few other performers. He became a success because he managed to write poetry that filled a political function: a poetry the Left could use as cultural propaganda. Now, after his murder, the books of "our martyred comrade" are selling fast.

But if Pasolini was a martyr, he died for no cause. No one really knows who killed him, or why, but for the moment it appears to have been a killing motivated by sexual passions. The young boy who has confessed to the crime, "Pino" Pelosi, said he did it "because he (Pasolini) wanted to change roles. I said no, the agreement was that I got to be the man. So he hit me and called me a dirty pig. And then I didn't see anything any more and started hitting him and hitting him as hard as I could." Whether or not the story is this simplistic, the assassination was as disgusting, as degrading, as gross and pornographic as the worst scene in one of Pasolini's recent movies. (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Salo: or The Last Days of Sodom). This massacre had no cause, served no purpose.

If Pier Paolo Pasolini was, then, a political phony, a mediocre poet, an opportunist filmmaker capitalizing on the Roman desire for circuses with lots of blood and sex, and if his death was such a senseless piece of violence--why all the fuss? Was the shock expressed by all Italy, and especially Rome, merely political propaganda of the PCI, melodramatics of the intellectual elite, and bloodthirsty scan-dalmongering on the part of the greater public? Of course all this contributed to the clamor, but there was something else behind the strong reaction of the students who marched through Rome in mourning, the political activists who pasted up posters all over the city, tthe journalists who analyzed the significance of his death in newspapers of left and right, and the people who argued all angles of the crime in the bars over coffee.

Although they themselves may not have realized it, for many Italians Pasolini was a living symbol. He represented the darker side of an Italian psyche, the nightmare of the Italian middle-class. (As, say, Frankenstein was the dark side of the Romantic soul. And Pasolini was among the last Romantics.) Acting as Italy's walking conscience, Pasolini not only pointed an accusing finger at all the economic, political, aesthetic and emotional problems of the society, but internalized them, making them his own neuroses. A sensitive, intelligent individual, he could not accept the easy solutions: to be a member of the Catholic Church, to play the Italian lover, to ignore poverty and injustice around him. Nor could he escape the influence of his social conditioning; it was impossible for him to forget the Church, to break the emotional stranglehold his mother had on him, to give up the luxuries and power his success brought him. And the fact that he ultimately failed in his efforts to sublimate his feelings of guilt, alienation, hate and desire into art enabled educated Italians to identify more closely with him.

Pasolini's attitude toward religion, for example, brought the problem modern Italians confront into a sharper focus. Pasolini was an atheist, and had no sympathy for the political machinations of the Church. But his racial consciousness was Roman Catholic; he took his symbols and modes of thought from Christian myth. In his prose he used Biblical forms such as the parable, and frequently quoted Christ. He preserved an Old Testament belief that the body was foul and that women were evil. (In his Hell, the demons are women.) Pasolini wanted to be a Christ-figure, to have everyone hate him and crucify him, while he took their sins upon himself, thervby redeeming all sinners. This was his personal answer. To the public he offered a vision with no resolution but faith: the stark picture of his most artistic film Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew). The movie is set in the poorest, most barren part of Southern Italy, and the parts are played by amateurs. Christ dies in Calabria.

ff In this film, Pasolini's eighty-year-old mother, with whom he lived all his life, plays the Virgin Mary. Their love-hate relationship was an extreme example of a very common psychological problem among Italian men: "il mamma-ismo." For Pasolini the situation was intensified by the fact that he never loved another woman. He was repelled by women's bodies and pregnancy filled him with horror. As he wrote to Oriana Fallaci: "I don't want to know what's in a woman's belly. Motherood disgusts me." Pasolini cultivated masculinity; he exercized every day, kept himself strong, virile-looking, tough. Yet he wanted to play the woman in his sexual encounters. Socialized into a completely dominating role, the Italian male may often fantasize a situation in which he is dominated. Pasolini acted out such fantasies in city slums, and projected them into his films.

Pasolini's political activism was a similar middle-class male fantasy. The conflict of his communist ideals with his capitalist life is a slightly magnified reflection of the mentality of the Italian bourgeoisie, a select elite who received a traditional education in a fascistic system and are now confronted with the demands of the proletariat for a decent life. Pasolini was a leftist even though his older brother was killed by a leftist group in a vicious slaughter--which turned out to be a tragic mistake. He supported the PCI despite the fact that they tried to disown him when his homosexuality first became known, only to reclaim him again when "Ragazzi di Vita made him famous.

But he never gave up his aristocratic attitudes. His books and films show the proletariat as merely a class to be manipulated. As a film-maker, and even more as a homosexual who could buy any boy he chose (and did so) Pasolini exploited the working classes. The night of his death, he picked up a boy to satisfy his sexual needs, took the kid out for dinner (Pasolini didn't eat) and then drove off with him in his Alfa 2000 to a private place. Ironically, Pasolini himself helped to perpetrate the prostitution he deplored.

Pasolini acutely analyzed the psychic conflicts of the intellectual Italian even as he lived them. Magnified by his artistic sensibility, these problems become universal Pasolini's neuroses were Italian versions of man's traumas. The alienation of birth, the love-hate dialectic of sex, the conflict of principles and suppressed desires; these are all part of the angst of human existence. Oriana Fallaci, and other friends of Pasolini, have said he wanted to die, and to die the kind of violent death he did. Certainly the abyss fascinated him. He sought the dangerous, the sordid, with passion. He loved New York because he saw it as "a war you go to to kill yourself." To Fallaci, he described a scene in New York that impressed him: "Yesterday, on 42nd St., I saw a man dying. He had a package in his hand. He tied it up and then hurled it on the ground so violently that the package broke. Then the man leant against the wall, slowly slid to the ground and stayed there, dying. No one stopped to watch him, help him. I didn't either. But is that wrong? Is it pitiless? Maybe it's a superior form of pity. You understand, to let others die."

Pasolini would have found a paradoxical meaning in his own senseless death.