While, in life, [Pasolini's] hunger for the "rough trade" of the Roman slums ended in a violent death, in film, his metaphor of life-as-ingestion ("devour") assumed the monstrous proportions of a last supper of feces…. The compelling salience of the supper image in its stubborn and variegated reincarnations would suggest it commanded a station of prominence in the imagination of the filmmaker…. [The] dining metaphor does recur in Pasolini's work in a number of contexts, as an expression of spiritual hunger (The Gospel According to Matthew), as an act of assimilation or communion (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966), as a direct expression of the bodily hunger of poverty (La Ricotta), or as a natural metaphor of the animality of consumerism (Salo, Pigsty). (p. 19)

The filmic metamorphosis of his gastric metaphor captures the process by which his movies seem to grow out of each other, in the manner of...