With the conclusion of Theorem, Pasolini left us in the company of today's bourgeois paterfamilias, stripped of all save his despairing confusion, wandering distractedly across the acid volcanic wastes that had been glimpsed previously throughout the film like almost subliminal reminders of his cryptozoic ancestry. As if resuming the tale, Pigsty [or Pigpen] … begins in the same setting, with an identical outcast struggling across the lifeless ash-dunes; the pangs assailing him now, however, are no longer those of conscience or doubt but simply those of an excruciating hunger. Pasolini gives us no time to consider this apparent simplification before he has once again broadened the metaphor alarmingly by cutting in the first glimpses of the parallel story of which the film is composed. In direct balance to Theorem …, Pigsty punctuates the primitive with the ornate; although this time the two separate narratives are of roughly equal length, if...