Word: pasolini
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...this film, Pasolini's eighty-year-old mother, with whom he lived all his life, plays the Virgin Mary. Their love-hate relationship was an extreme example of a very common psychological problem among Italian men: "il mamma-ismo." For Pasolini the situation was intensified by the fact that he never loved another woman. He was repelled by women's bodies and pregnancy filled him with horror. As he wrote to Oriana Fallaci: "I don't want to know what's in a woman's belly. Motherood disgusts me." Pasolini cultivated masculinity; he exercized every day, kept himself strong, virile...
...Pier Paolo Pasolini was, then, a political phony, a mediocre poet, an opportunist filmmaker capitalizing on the Roman desire for circuses with lots of blood and sex, and if his death was such a senseless piece of violence--why all the fuss? Was the shock expressed by all Italy, and especially Rome, merely political propaganda of the PCI, melodramatics of the intellectual elite, and bloodthirsty scan-dalmongering on the part of the greater public? Of course all this contributed to the clamor, but there was something else behind the strong reaction of the students who marched through Rome in mourning...
Although they themselves may not have realized it, for many Italians Pasolini was a living symbol. He represented the darker side of an Italian psyche, the nightmare of the Italian middle-class. (As, say, Frankenstein was the dark side of the Romantic soul. And Pasolini was among the last Romantics.) Acting as Italy's walking conscience, Pasolini not only pointed an accusing finger at all the economic, political, aesthetic and emotional problems of the society, but internalized them, making them his own neuroses. A sensitive, intelligent individual, he could not accept the easy solutions: to be a member...
...Pasolini's attitude toward religion, for example, brought the problem modern Italians confront into a sharper focus. Pasolini was an atheist, and had no sympathy for the political machinations of the Church. But his racial consciousness was Roman Catholic; he took his symbols and modes of thought from Christian myth. In his prose he used Biblical forms such as the parable, and frequently quoted Christ. He preserved an Old Testament belief that the body was foul and that women were evil. (In his Hell, the demons are women.) Pasolini wanted to be a Christ-figure, to have everyone hate...
...Pasolini's political activism was a similar middle-class male fantasy. The conflict of his communist ideals with his capitalist life is a slightly magnified reflection of the mentality of the Italian bourgeoisie, a select elite who received a traditional education in a fascistic system and are now confronted with the demands of the proletariat for a decent life. Pasolini was a leftist even though his older brother was killed by a leftist group in a vicious slaughter--which turned out to be a tragic mistake. He supported the PCI despite the fact that they tried to disown him when...