is devastating. Most artists only dream of being protested by fascists — Pasolini was. (What would the equivalent be today: getting bashed by QAnon on social media?). Pasolini was first and foremost an antifascist. His Christ, in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, is a revolutionary, Marxist Christ, trashing the merchants in the public square. And in Mamma Roma it is the city of Rome that stands for fascism — the oppression of the poor: those ugly, naked, monolithic apartment buildings looming in the distance — below them the fragments of ruins — grotesque, phallic, crumbling -- like Pasolini imagines fascism to be. But Pasolini found his ‘proletariat’ in the faces of the boys — they belonged to him — the boys of Rome, the young suburban ne’er do wells -- their grubby mischievous faces — playing soccer, loitering, stealing stuff, plotting to lay the neighborhood tramp. Pasolini loved them in more than in just a political way; although his adoration might be deemed economic, as it was those boys that he paid to have sex with him every night. And one of those boys (Giuseppe Pelosi) killed him (although his friend Laura Betti insisted that it was the fascists who really did it.). Let’s face it — for a lot of people Pasolini represents the apotheosis of evil. In private, with his boys, he was the ‘king of shit’ —he wanted them to do their ‘business’ on him; they were forever his tasty, nasty brethren. Pasolini refers to his sexual predilection at the end of Mamma Roma, when Ettore, the son of prostitute Anna Magnani, is strapped to his bed in jail — the bed where he dies — and his fellow inmates are joking about the 7th ring of Hell which apparently (sorry, I’ve never read Dante) is shit. How did Pasolini’s pickups feel about being asked to take a dump on him? I’m sure it mattered not at all to them really, he was just an old guy who gave them money to do gross things. But the fact that Pasolini was an admitted human toilet seems to have hurt his literary reputation somewhat. I remember when I first found out about all this from Peter Day. Peter was a gay man — a Brit, very witty, very smart, kind of dashing too. He had a lovely young boyfriend (who I still know). Peter committed suicide a couple of years after I met him; he was on the board of my theatre company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. I remember walking up to him in Glad Day Bookshop about 40 years ago (the gay bookstore in Toronto) and telling him that I had written a play about Pasolini. Peter said, blithely, savouring every word: ‘You know what Pasolini was into, don’t you?” “No,” I said innocently — for I was somewhat innocent back then — “Shit. He liked boys to shit on him.” I didn’t know quite what to say. I was disappointed, partially because I hadn’t included this in my play, and also frankly because it took Pasolini down one notch from the very top of the pedestal where I had so carefully placed him. (But I was also a bit frightened by how much Peter enjoyed making me feel like an ignorant prude.) Certainly Pasolini is my ideal. A perfect artist, and shockingly amoral in real life. On the streets — he was a scatalogical outlaw, on the screen, a puritan aesthete. All that mattered to him was beauty. In Mamma Roma Pasolini's ex-lover Franco Citti plays Magnani’s ruthless ex-pimp, and an oddly gorgeous boy with the face of a 10 year old — a tiny pug nose and pouting mouth — Ettore Garofolo (a second glance at Ettore Garofolo makes you feel like a pederast ) is Magnani’s gawky adolescent son. (Garofolo appeared only in two movies after this.) Pasolini loved each of these young men ostentatiously, the camera worships their faces, their very ordinary sex appeal, their imperfect masculine charm. Then there is Magnani, simply a force of nature. In her first scenes she is dragging pigs to a wedding — presumably to make fun of the hick girl her pimp Citti is marrying. In every scene she laughs or cries or screams or dances — or all four — she’s eternally shaking her voluptuous body — not just with abandon, it’s a commitment to animality that is all too frighteningly human. She’s terrifyingly real; and gives quite a new definition to words like femininity and ‘woman.’ The bond she has with her son is primal, her friend asks if she would die for him. She says ‘like Christ on the cross.’ And though she quits hooking — in order to ‘bring Ettore up right’ — there is absolutely no hope for her, or him. The forces of capitalism are against them. Rome will eat her son — the way Magnani would like to, obviously. She says ‘look at him, isn’t he a prince?” (If only it was possible for any of us to love anybody, without killing them just a little.) She watches him working in the restaurant, and Pasolini captures the aching essence of a young buck at work, an anter-less stag strutting about boldly on his skinny legs, grinning sheepishly at his mother and hauling food from table to table, as in love with her as she is with him. Mamma Roma’s dream of respectability is in vain; the pimp Citti reveals to Ettore that his mother is a whore. Ettore then steals a dying man’s radio in a hospital (in anger), the next thing you know he’s in the seventh circle of Hell, strapped to his bed in prison. “I’ll be good” he pleads, but it’s too late, the system has already chewed him up and spit him out. I wrote a play once called Why We Tortured Him for Theatre Aquarius. Susan Clements --a fascist, law and order freak -- trashed it in The Hamilton Spectator, without either reading it or seeing it. The play was cancelled by Theatre Aquarius It was a play about the relationship between poverty and crime. It’s not something you’re supposed to talk about. Pasolini does. But you will not find this type of truth in Niagara Falls, stitched on a pillow. You might find it one night in Rome, when you’re being screwed against an ancient ruin. If you're like me, you will gaze up at the stars, and suddenly realize that ruin is you.
