[Salo: 120 Days of Sodom] is perhaps the most appalling fictional film I have ever seen (and I want the adjective to retain its ambiguity). I shall doubtless be haunted by it for a long time, but I'm not convinced that the haunting will be very profitable. It is a very difficult film to cope with, because it plays so disturbingly on the most dangerous ambivalences. The torments Dante imagined for sinners in the name of religion, the overtly erotic cruelties of de Sade, Nazi atrocities, and the ambiguously liberating/obsessive fantasies of Pasolini himself, all merge here until they become inextricable. One can perceive two clear, conscious strategies at work in the film, which constitute an effort towards purity of impulse: the attempt to distinguish cleanly between sexual acts based on mutual response and those based on power and degradation; and the struggle for a rigorous stylistic distancing...