Archaic Modernism

Queer Poetics in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Daniel Humphrey

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780814343111
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

In Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini's own theories of a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida's concept of écriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini's Greek tragedy films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is at the very heart of the filmmaker's project. More daringly, he contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western civilization's formative texts. Archaic Modernism is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of Pasolini's feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes, a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the filmmaker's part. Considering the film as the third in an informal, maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the most important origin tales of Western civilization. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world: Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy of Life, and Salò, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.

1

Queer Oedipus

Oedipus Rex (1967)

A haunting tale is presented near the end of Il fiore delle mille e una notte, Pasolini’s penultimate film, based on part of the “Tale of the Third Dervish” from the Tales of 1001 Nights. It follows young Prince Yunan (Salvatore Sapienza), who washes ashore on a remote island containing an underground chamber. Within its confines, an even younger prince, whose fifteenth birthday it is, is hidden by his father to protect him from being murdered that day according to a prophesy. Perhaps four or five years older, the gentle and beautiful Yunan promises to protect the youth from harm, thus earning his trust. The unnamed boy (portrayed by an uncredited actor) quickly lets down his guard and eventually allows Yunan into his bed to sleep. Soon, however, Yunan is overtaken by a trance in which he is compelled to leave the bed, return with a knife, and kill his slumbering host by thrusting the knife into the boy’s lower backside. This sequence can certainly discomfort a contemporary spectator conditioned by twenty-first-century mores associated with eroticism, sexuality, and teenaged bodies.

In an excellent short essay on Salò, John David Rhodes addresses a curious response by spectators to that scandalous film, one disavowing any erotic enjoyment it might occasion, due not so much to the violence and coprophagia the film eventually presents but to the age of its very literal sex objects. As Rhodes puts it, “The film’s deadly serious play with the vicissitudes of arousal depends on bodies of precisely this age. These are bodies that may in fact be legal fair game, but whose proximity to a just-vanishing childhood . . . makes the film’s presentation of their nakedness to us as discomfiting or embarrassing as it is potentially arousing.”1 Implicit in Rhodes’s discussion of Pasolini’s pubescent bodies and the thematic of agency/exploitation they occasion is a disturbing ambiguity signified by these bodies at the tipping point between child and adult. This biological and legally defined tipping point stands, in much of the late work of Pasolini, in allegorical relation to the moment innocent bodies are corrupted by late capitalism. The legend of Oedipus also has a number of “tipping points”—between innocence and knowledge, to mention only one—and these have rough corollaries in the transitions outlined in Freud’s Oedipus complex. More importantly, however, for my purposes at this moment, the two male characters’ fateful encounter in the “Tale of the Third Dervish” presents a darkly homoerotic example of situational irony. It beautifully illustrates Pasolini’s rich, disturbing tendency to connect fate with queer desire. And although this is seen at its most thrillingly distilled in Il fiore delle mille e una notte, it is most effectively elaborated in Edipo re.2 The concept of fateful queer desire is inseparable from the filmmaker’s broad formulation of queer irony, a rarely discussed component of the artist’s work and one that has provocative ramifications for queer theory. A comparison of Pasolini’s adaptation of the “Tale of the Third Dervish” with the centuries-old original brings these concepts into focus and sets the stage for the way I will approach the director’s earlier adaptation of Oedipus Rex.

Rhetoricians have defined many different types of irony, such as philosophical irony, rhetorical irony, practical irony, dramatic irony, comic irony, and self-irony.3 Two of the earliest forms, identified in the work of the classical Greeks, are dramatic and situational irony.4 Dramatic irony occurs when “characters are unaware of important circumstances about which the audience is fully informed.”5 Situational irony is more crucial to Pasolini’s cinema. It is best understood not as a mode of rhetoric but as the outcome of events, specifically as an incongruity between one’s behavior and the results of it as they ultimately unfold in a narrative. It involves, as Joana Garmendia puts it, a “lack of intentionality as a clear distinguishing feature.” Interestingly for our purposes, the first example Garmendia offers is a comically queer one: “When the Turkish police created a rainbow with their water cannons in their attempt to stop [a] gay parade,” she writes, we witnessed a “clear example of situational irony.”6 More regularly, however, situational irony has been employed to illustrate the unavoidability of fate: you can exercise for health but might well die of a heart attack at the gym (hence, the irony of the “situation”). This form of irony is disturbing in that it chillingly suggests the ultimate futility of human action. It is precisely the overlap between situational and dramatic irony—and, as in the real-world Turkish example, the emergence of an unexpectedly queer outcome from machinations of patriarchal control—found in Edipo re that links it to Pasolini’s cinematic version of the “Tale of the Third Dervish.” Pasolini’s adaptations of Oedipus Rex and the Tales of 1001 Nights are ultimately both testaments to the filmmaker-theorist’s manifested vision of sinthomosexuality, as defined by Lee Edelman and detailed in the introduction. This is to say, they articulate sexuality in terms of homosexual desire, and homosexual desire in terms of jouissance.

As for the cinematic adaptation of “Tale of the Third Dervish,” it is important to keep in mind that, while the many translations of the story vary in their level of homosexual connotation,7 Pasolini’s adaptation practically exemplifies a (pederastic) male homoerotic sensibility, one spun through with ironic force. For instance, rather than reconstructing the stone staircase in the underground chamber as described in every translation of the original tale that I have consulted, Pasolini’s film gives us a rope ladder for Yunan to climb down. Filmed from below, his naked body, with his genitals and anal cleft central in the frame, descends closer and closer toward the spectator (see figure 1). Once inside the chamber, the sensitive Yunan weeps over its occupant’s initial, fear-based rejection of him—like a rejected would-be lover might respond. But Yunan quickly earns the boy’s trust, and the two then joyfully embrace. The original tale also describes the older male giving his new friend a bath, “rubbing him down and bringing him a change of clothes.”8 Pasolini, however, takes things further. In the film, we see the two bathing together naked, embracing each other again while playfully splashing about in the water. Furthermore, while the earlier version never describes the older man in the younger man’s bed, the two do sleep together on the same mat.rah. in the film. Although Pasolini biographer Barth David Schwartz contends that the film’s image of the two men sleeping side by side offers “no hint of sexual relations,”9 the fatal conclusion of the scene, moments later, strongly alludes to sexuality, if not actual sex—and, as we come to expect with Pasolini’s cinema, in the most violently provocative way.

Figure 1. A naked Yunan climbs down the rope ladder.

In the original story, the boy’s death occurs while the two are awake. Yunan takes hold of a knife to cut a melon, only to slip and fall on top of the youth, penetrating his heart with the blade.10 In Pasolini’s version, the assassination resembles anal copulation a tergo so strongly as to make a sexual allegory of the tale almost unavoidable. As both slumber, Yunan gets out of the bed and sleepwalks to the wall, where he takes the lethal dagger from the shelf. Returning to the bed, he climbs in and straddles the boy, who is sleeping on his stomach (see figure 2). Pulling the boy’s blanket down around his legs so that his buttocks are exposed, the somnambulist raises his knife, and, from the position he would have to assume to penetrate the youth’s anus with his penis, he plunges the dagger into the boy’s back.11 In this way, Pasolini rewrites the “Tale of the Third Dervish” to change an absurdly comic fulfillment of prophecy in waking life—killing someone by slipping with a knife meant to cut a melon—into an erotically unsettling encounter set in the land of the nocturnal unconscious.

Figure 2. Yunan straddles the boy.

Beyond those just addressed, there are a great many differences between the original work and the cinematic adaptation—indeed, too many to note here. The crucial element shared by both, however, revolves around the boy’s prophesied death on his fifteenth birthday, a fateful anniversary repeatedly posited as “the limit between childhood and manhood” in the Islamic tradition.12 As Leo Bersani points out, in the ancient world (whether Grecian, Roman, or Muslim), the role of the penetratee in male homosexual relations is exceedingly problematic. It is a position certainly not approved of for adult citizens, let alone for polis leaders.13 Indeed, according to Michel Foucault, in ancient Greece, male citizens—even in adulthood—found their leadership curtailed if they were proven to have been “the passive partners in [sexual] activity” when they were boys.14 As a result, the fifteen-year-old prince’s penetration by another male invalidates his ability to assume his ordained role as king.15 In effect, the literal killing of the boy stands for the metaphorical death associated with male homosexuality. It thus connects desire and death in an uncanny way, one that haunts Pasolini’s cinema.

Rather than Pasolini retrospectively criticizing or praising the morals or ethics of the “Tale of the Third Dervish” in his adaptation, he is more interested in the poetic possibilities of Eros and Thanatos that the relationship between Yunan and the young boy evokes. This is to say, the stakes for pleasure are high since, in Pasolini’s take on the ancient tale, pleasure is marked at the unconscious site where homosexual penetration merges with the death drive. Furthermore, as an account of two ancient royals’ intergenerational desire leading to a patriarchal linage’s destruction, the “Tale of the Third Dervish” queerly echoes an only somewhat less homoerotic account of regal filicide, albeit one disguised as patricide, previously dramatized in Pasolini’s oeuvre. The filmmaker’s visions of the “Tale of the Third Dervish” and, as we shall see, Oedipus Rex show how as the death of a lineage, filicide (virtual or real) is simultaneously patricide, since the killing of one’s only royal son is the killing of one’s family line and one’s own patriarchal subjectivity. When sexualized, this expresses how the Oedipal family harbors an inherently self-destructive queer energy that is both its negation and its apotheosis. It is with this in mind that I have been drawn to the rich metaphor found toward the end of Il fiore delle mille e una notte. Through it, Pasolini demonstrates how, vertiginously enough, homosexual sodomy is at once destructive and seminal to the cultural imperatives that ultimately define bourgeois heteronormativity.

Unlike Pasolini’s filmed version of the all-male “Tale of the Third Dervish,” I argue that his earlier Edipo re illustrates a paradigmatic instance of heterosexual relations only operative within the deconstructive forces of homosexual desire. In this way, Pasolini’s queer turn on the Oedipal complex is one that offers the family romance as the metaphorical death for culture itself. This is, in the context of a civilization founded on the values illustrated by Greek texts like Oedipus Rex, a supreme irony. Like the homophobic water canons at that gay pride event in Turkey, the force of heterocentric law finally manifests itself to be ultimate midwife to an intangible queer actualization.

Blindness as Insight

A critical detail that Pasolini brings to his adaptation of the “Tale of the Third Dervish,” not found in the original, is revealed when the younger prince tells Yunan that the prophecy that led him to the underground chamber specified that his own death would occur at the hands of a man with no eyes. It is in this way that Pasolini’s “Tale of the Third Dervish” is best understood in relationship to Edipo re. The fact that Yunan cannot see while he sleepwalks with dagger in hand toward the naked boy is a crucial allusion to the queer negativity more subtly articulated in Edipo re. Oedipus, in the film Pasolini made five years before Il fiore delle mille e una notte, has full access to the literal sense of sight when he fulfills the prophecy to kill his father. Yet, like Yunan, Oedipus blindly, if metaphorically so, destroys. But rather than a brother/son/lover figure, Oedipus kills his father, the patriarch. Ultimately, there is no difference between the two impulses. A son, brother, or male lover is always already an embodiment of the patriarch.

By bringing these two texts into play with each other, one from Arabia and one from ancient Greece, a form of queerness emerges that is central to Pasolini’s larger, career-long project in which myths of all kinds fold and refold into one another. This is to say that an archaic modernism emerges through Pasolini’s queer cinematics. It reveals itself in the homoerotic, exotic, historical, and mythic that is visible through the filmmaker’s cinema of poetry. Significantly, his archaic modernism, this cinema of poetry, also makes perceptible that which is unseen yet ever present: the vital workings of sinthomosexuality within ideology.

On the one hand, Oedipus Rex is a near-perfect text for illustrating archaic modernism, in that the story, as originally dramatized by Sophocles, lends itself to Pasolini’s interest in the ideological relations between the archaic and the unstable maturation of a civilization. On the other hand, Oedipus, as a primary figure in Freud’s narrative of complex human subjectivity, exemplifies the maturation of a form of consciousness to which modernity responds. Oedipus also relates to modernity through irony, itself a trope of significance at least as great for the modernist mind as it was for a classical consciousness. The turn of events in Oedipus Rex, in which the protagonist’s parents endeavor to thwart a bloody, incestuous, dynasty-destroying destiny, only to assure its realization, is a particularly clear, even paradigmatic instance of situational irony. As there can hardly be a soul who does not know the outcome of the tale before witnessing a production, it is, arguably, a paradigmatic instance of dramatic irony as well.

In order to make the strongest case for the deep situational irony of the Oedipus myth, Pasolini dramatizes on-screen a backstory that is only described in dialogue in Sophocles’s theatrical version of 429 BCE (all that happens in Thebes prior to the plague, which descends on the land under Oedipus’s rule). In the filmmaker’s reconstruction of the Sophoclean ...