On November 2, 1975, exactly fifty years ago, one of the greatest Italian artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century, Pier Paolo Pasolini, left us.
That morning, P.P.P.’s battered body was found at the Idroscalo in Ostia, on a dirt road soaked in mud and blood. Today that place has become a well-kept park, enriched by a monument filled with engraved quotations dedicated to the writer. If he could see the coming and going of people who, that very day, immediately after the police removed his body, flocked to the scene almost as if it were a procession—free to linger as though it were an exhibition—perhaps he would question the purpose of such a decorative monument. Probably that face of his—delicate yet “masculine”, “strong”, “feminine”, as Fallaci described it—would twist into anger at the hypocrisy that has always lurked behind certain faces who, even now, stubbornly deface his image, violating his name.
Pasolini was like that. He criticized every form of pseudo-capitalist bourgeois hypocrisy that shaped the very society he had helped form, at the dawn of unrestrained consumerism and modern capitalism. Ignored, hated and loved at the same time; marginalized then and celebrated now; his writings and warnings still “sound threatening”, as if he had already understood everything and we were still late in arriving. Politically and morally censored, “the nameless animal”, as he called himself, continues relentlessly to make people talk.
And if today he could read, observe, hear and listen. If today he could see Italy, he would say the same things he wrote in Lutheran Letters, La Divina Mimesis, or the Corsair Writings. Italy is the same as it was ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. Only the costumes have changed—the poor suburbs, the exploited immigrants, and the middle-class man desperately trying to imitate the rich, turning himself into a ridiculous figure buried in debt. They are still here, just like the politicians. Those mediocre politicians of the past are still idiots, and the Christian Democrats have only changed their name. In the end, everything is the same. People don’t care, or pretend to care. Young people no longer have anything to fight for. They are only distant relatives of those Pasolini described in The Best of Youth. Now, a scandal erupts over the closure of a nightclub, not when they are denied a future—something they do not have, despite having everything. Mobilizations? They unfold on the new means of communication known as “social networks”, which are anything but social. Pier Paolo criticized mass media, consumer society, and the cult of appearance; he condemned servility to power, shady negotiations, and mafia massacres. But in the end, they won. And he lost—and today as then, he does not come out the winner.
Could you imagine him on television with Bruno Vespa talking about the Mafia? Or on a talk show discussing Mafia Capitale, rigged public contracts, Mose, Expo, and everything else? Could you imagine him standing helpless before the desolate media exploitation legitimized in the name of every possible right, in that proliferation of sexuality and cheap theatrics? He, who criticized sexuality reduced to obligation, folklore, and consumption. He who, as Marcello Veneziani recalls, “wrote pages against abortion, pornography, drugs, and for the sanctity of life; against genetic manipulation and permissive society; against the reduction of homosexuality to the gay label and its claim to be equal to marriage, until becoming bourgeois and bureaucratized through civil unions, in an almost unreal way.”
The unreal of a world so starved of emotion, empty and desecrated of values, that it has become so permissive it no longer appears democratic, but artificial, simulated. Pasolini objected to all this. He, corrupter of youth, homosexual, misunderstood and never truly outdated, still reveals through his critiques the many facets of a personality both uncomfortable and true. Convenient to the left and inconvenient to the right, yet just as inconvenient to the left and convenient to the right, he condemned the immorality of a system increasingly cynical and counterfeit, corrupt and corrupting. A system that, in the end, took him away, leaving behind only an uncomfortable image—yet still present.
by Giuseppe Papalia
