[While] relatively modest in depicting more or less conventional (oral and anal) sexual acts, Salò is painfully explicit in areas previously unexplored on American screens—specifically, urination, defecation and sexual torture. That New York audiences can calmly tolerate Pasolini's cinematic excess offers compelling testimony about a liberal society's power to accommodate (or inability to resist) the most extreme repudiations of its own underlying values, like decency….

[This] kind of tolerance undermines the film's raison d'être. When Sade's notions lose their power to shock, or are no longer taken seriously, they also lose their political and moral significance….

I cannot help concluding that Pasolini was less interested in the overall point of his adaptation (if there was any) than in its obscene details. But I do not think the reason for this is, as he suggests, that before Pasolini's death in 1975 …, his homosexuality and radical politics were warped...