Watchable bodies: Salo's young non-actors

This essay focuses on scenes in the film "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) in which teenage boys (played by non-professional actors) undress and have their naked bodies appraised by a group of older men. The film's enunciation of excoriating critique is seen to depend on the exhibition of a concretely desirable body, a body that will be forced to live through the hell that, for Pasolini, modern Italy and the modern world both dominated by late capitalism had become. (Quotes from original text)