Gay saints

Pasolini and the sanctity of cinema

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  • Published 20241105
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-01-2
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook, PDF

FEW FIGURES EMBODY the contradictions inherent to Catholicism more explicitly than the poet, writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini; as Thomas Hardy observed, the greater the sinner the greater the saint. The Marxist/poet/homosexual/atheist was living proof of the efficacy of baptism: holy water does not wash off. If one is serious about emulating the life of Christ, then one has carte blanche to condemn hierarchy and hypocrisy, rail against institutional authority, and ultimately annoy the powerful so much that they order one’s death. If the example of the saints is instructive, then without meeting this last criterion one is not really trying.

In his lifetime, Pasolini managed to annoy almost everyone in postwar Italian society. A Marxist in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci, he was booted from the Italian Communist Party on charges of corrupting youths (a perfectly Catholic euphemism) and later condemned for his counter-­revolutionary depiction of the life of Christ. Near every movie he premiered was attacked by both fascists and communists, who were appalled by what they respectively perceived as the films’ corrosive immorality and unflattering depictions of the urban poor. In the same year he was convicted for blasphemy – Catholicism being the state religion of Italy until 1984 – the Church funded his 1964 adaptation of The Gospel According to St Matthew, included by the Vatican on its 1995 list of ‘Some Important Films’. He fell out and later reconciled with fellow filmmaker Federico Fellini, refused to marry the infatuated Maria Callas, and in the left-­wing student revolutions of 1968 sided with the police, declaring them the true heroes of the class war. It is not surprising that in 1975 he was horrifically murdered aged fifty-­three; the crime remains unsolved. In the tumult of the Years of Lead – the two decades of hyper-­partisan political unrest initiated by ’68 – it’s surprising no one did it sooner.

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Culture warrior

It’s safe to say, then, that Star’s protagonist is not a carbon copy of Mishima, despite the novelist’s status as Japan’s first Sūpāsutā (superstar). Twenty-three and blindingly gorgeous, Rikio Mizuno, known by the anglicised monomer Richie, is a Japanese James Dean. ‘I am a speeding car that never stops,’ Richie muses, conflating the icon with the instrument of his death. ‘I’m huge, shiny and new, coming from the other side of midnight… I ride and ride and never arrive.’ Unlike Dean, Richie survives past his twenty-fourth birthday, the addition of a single year weighing on him like a death sentence. At the story’s conclusion, when Richie is confronted by the crinkled visage of a matinee idol of yesteryear, he realises that having celebrated the twenty-fourth birthday Dean was denied by his Porsche 550 Spyder, ‘Little Bastard’, he has missed his chance to, as Dean said, ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’ 

Anyone who has been to a gay guy’s thirtieth birthday party will recognise the sentiment.

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