..with this film Pasolini faces the modern world in a new light, compared to past experiences; there is here, a dramatic awareness of the horror and anarchy of power, that he refuses to approach in a realistic way to escape in a metaphoric rappresentation. The metaphor, therefore, represent the device through which the poet-director express the horrors perpetrated by power to the human body: "the tranformation of a man into an obcject[a thing], the nullification of personality". Nothing, by the pasolinian point of view, than power arbitrarily driven by pure economic needs, that eludes the common feeling.
"It's a power that maniulates bodies in a horrible way and that has nothing less than the manipulation perpetrated by Hitler: It manipulates them transforming consciousness, so in the worst way possible; establishing new alienating and false values, that are the values of consumption; it happens what Marx described as: The genocyde of the living, real, past cultures". [Pier Paolo Pasolini]
The power, in and out of itself, is a ritual codifier; the repetition of the sodomitic act represent, for its mechanicalness,the paradigm that sums up this terrifying imposition of neocapitalism.
For the executioner, therefore, the problem is the repetition of the act in relation to death, that brings him to search not for one, but a hundred victims, because he could not otherwise repeat himself losing his power. But in the film there's another solution, to fake the murder of the victim, while not killing it at all: the return to lfe would become a perverse variation, being the death's ritual consumed anyway".
Salò's executioners, through the manipulation of the bodies acquire the power of Gods on Earth, so God is always their model.
