Of Muscles and Men
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Such temporal, cultural, and gendered moments of non-correspondence in the film, invoked in part by Callas’ fame and reputation, add weight to Silvestra Mariniello’s argument that Pasolini was trying to create a poetic sense of rupture or a gap in the notion of dialectical synthesis in his work. Mariniello calls attention to a newspaper article Pasolini wrote the year of his death in 1975, in which he stresses the failure of the concept of evolution or progression to hold any further meaning in Italian politics:
In this article, published in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, Pasolini sketches an analysis of the Italian social-political situation that is brimming with consequences implied by the concept of evolution: the gap between, on the one hand, a rural paleo-industrial society and, on the other, a consumer society, the reality of multinational corporations, and the end of the state. We are able to act, to intervene, only if we understand the links between old Fascism and the state and between new Fascism and the new economic-political structure. Political parties are finished, and “it is no longer a question of ruling,” Pasolini remarks, inviting the Italian Left to rethink its political role [113, emphasis in original].
By connecting popular political pronouncements of economic progress to Italy’s fascist past in this way (in fact, Pasolini called for several politicians in the Christian Democratic party to stand trial as traitors), Pasolini proposes a gap in the Italian historical narrative of cultural and economic progress since World War II. He sees, rather, a negative dialectic which only produces more fascism under the guise of political and cultural evolution and neo-capitalism. The conundrum of what Pasolini believed to be Italy’s fascist past coexisting with its neo-fascist present in 1960s politics took the aesthetic form of dual-temporality in both Oedipus Rex and Medea. Thus, Maurizio Viano’s suggestion that Pasolini failed in his efforts to use the past as a metaphor for the present is
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unconvincing, especially since he so succinctly draws attention to the role of the centaur in Medea as a bridge between species, the divine and secular realms, and historical periods (242). The centaur, Chiron, serves as Jason’s guardian at the beginning of the film when he appears as a baby. The centaur evolves into a man as Jason becomes an adult and reappears mystically as both centaur and man later in the film (standing next to his own image in a split screen shot).
Accordingly, mythical thinking (represented by the centaur) is effaced but not completely eclipsed by enlightened rationality (represented by the man).
Chrion’s dual appearance illustrates Pasolini’s conviction that man has failed to evolve from one (historical) moment to the next.4
My emphasis on the politics of kinship in Pasolini’s Medea stems largely from the material he added to the myth, like the expanded role of the centaur.
Marianne McDonald points out that Pasolini also alters Medea’s image in Euripides’ play as a woman with particularly “modern” ideas about women’s equality by omitting her address to the women of Corinth (19). However, the amount of time he devotes in depicting Medea helping Jason steal the golden fleece and murdering her own brother, Apsyrtus, suggests that Medea’s agency, particularly in the context of marriage and kinship, is a central theme in the film. The scenes in Medea’s village begin with a fertility ritual underway. A young victim is sacrificed and the community spreads his blood and body parts all over the land and crops. In the process of the ritual the royal family is ridiculed by their subjects but soon thereafter reinscribed in their positions of power. The fertility ritual is followed by Medea’s visit to the shrine which houses the golden fleece, where she encounters Jason. The theme of heterosexual desire becomes explicit at this point, whereas the theme of homosexuality has already been introduced by Apsyrtus’ desirous gaze at the sacrifice victim at the beginning of the film.
The organization of these first scenes suggests that Pasolini was conscious of the differences between the relations of sexuality and the means of production, an awareness that resonates with Gayle Rubin’s concept of sex/gender or kinship systems. Rubin identifies this key difference in Frederick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in her pathbreaking 1975
essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” She cites the following passage from Engels as crucial to understanding his notion of the twofold nature of social production:
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one hand, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing, and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand, and of the family on the other ... [qtd. in Rubin 165].
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For Rubin, this passage provides evidence for a sex/gender system and suggests that both types of production (the production of the means of existence and that of human beings) are subject to control and organization. The control of sexuality in the guise of kinship is nowhere better illustrated in Pasolini’s Medea than in the scenes depicting Medea breaking tradition and offering herself as an object of marital exchange to Jason, rather than remaining a passive object of exchange between men. Following upon shots of the villagers harvesting crops (ensuring the material means of existence), Medea arrives with her brother to Jason’s camp in a horse-drawn cart. The golden fleece is draped over the back of the cart, implying that she is offering the mystical treasure as her dowry.5 Medea and Jason exchange desirous glances, as do Medea’s brother and Jason, and Jason gazes victoriously at the golden fleece. This triangle of desire between Jason, Medea, and Apsyrtus is thus contaminated by Jason’s parallel desire for the golden fleece.
The realm of mobile sexuality (in the movement of desire between the three characters) is juxtaposed with the realm of power and organized heterosexuality. Medea’s decision to offer herself to Jason involves a sacrifice and underscores the violent repercussions of acting outside of prescribed roles in the sex/gender system. After enlisting Apsyrtus to help her obtain the golden fleece for Jason, Medea murders him. During the long, drawn-out murder scene, Pasolini registers the shock of her actions on the faces of Jason and his men.
Medea is shown repeatedly hacking her brother to bits (mimicking the manner in which the sacrificial victim was dismembered in the fertility ritual) and throwing pieces of his body out of the getaway cart to ward off her father’s army. Medea’s violent departure from Colchis emphasizes the complete anni-hilation of her previous kinship structure and the repression of homosexual desire as a component of her pending roles as wife and mother. Apsyrtus’
desirous glances at Jason mirror the manner in which he looked at the young sacrificial victim minutes before his death during the fertility ritual, a scene that suggests for Viano an allegory of contemporary, legally sanctioned violence against homosexuals (245 –246).
Medea, however, is not the only female character in the film who ruptures the sex/gender system. Pasolini refers to two versions of the story of Medea’s rivals Creon and the princess Glauce; Euripides’ version, which appears as a dream sequence, and the director’s own version. In Euripides’ version, Glauce and Creon die as a result of Medea’s poisonous gifts. In Pasolini’s version, their deaths are depicted as Medea’s fantasies about her own abilities as a sor-ceress, a vision, perhaps, of what is supposed to happen as a result of the gifts but does not come to pass due to a diminishment of her power. Instead, when Glauce receives Medea’s gifts (this time supposedly for real), Glauce decides that she will not become Jason’s bride, thus removing herself as an object of exchange between her father and h
er would-be husband. Once again, this decision comes with violent consequences and sacrifice. Murder in Euripides’ version
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of the myth is reinterpreted by Pasolini as a dual suicide. Glauce jumps to her death from a cliff after trying on Medea’s garments, followed by her despairing father. Pasolini makes explicit the connection between Medea and Glauce as rupterers of kinship organization by superimposing their images during Glauce’s suicide. When she jumps to her death, Glauce wears the very garments that Medea wore in her native village. The suicide scene depicts the possibility of an alternative form of kinship between the two women, one that exists nowhere in Euripides’ tragedy.
Pasolini’s Medea deviates conspicuously from the original tragedy in other ways as well, most overtly in its use of a non–Western setting in the first half of the film to indicate Medea’s foreign place of origin. Filmed on location in Turkey and then in a castle in Pisa, the cultural and geographical juxtaposition in the film embodies Medea’s cultural and ethnic difference from Jason and Greek society in general.6 In the first half of the film, Pasolini establishes Medea’s royal status in her native village and her close relationship with Apsyrtus. The first two thirds of the film reflect his poetic vision of the myth, while the last third is modeled on Euripides’ play. Pasolini employed Turkish locals as extras in the scenes that depict a human sacrifice and fertility ritual on the outskirts of Medea’s village. The extras wear traditional clothing and are shot against a stark landscape of rustic dwellings built into steep cliffs. Pasolini has been criticized on many fronts for what some call cinematic tourism or orientalism. In a scathing critique that indulges in homophobic language, William Van Watson refers to Pasolini as the “creampuff of the Italian left,” and suggests that many of his films are “retreats and excursions into the undeveloped third world,”
characterized by a “constructed subproletariat innocence” (389; see also Viano 4). Elsewhere, Van Watson calls these “retreats” examples of Pasolini’s personal
“transgressive consumption” (389). By contrast, Mariniello suggests that Van Watson’s type of “rhetoric of nostalgia,” frequently associated with critical work on Pasolini, is often brought into academic analyses of the filmmaker’s work in order to neutralize, cover up, or misread his critique of the dialectic.7 In fact, she highlights Pasolini’s continual insistence, both in his writings and in his cinematography, on the inadequacy of materialist dialects through the continual juxtapositions of opposing models of history in his work. She suggests that the way in which a non-correspondence between diverse models of history and temporalities is created is more significant than Pasolini’s use of the third world as a discursive element in his films:
In La Divina Mimesis, for example, written between 1963 and 1965, he creates the prosopopoeia of the old inspiration coming to terms with the new reality: a total-izing, panoramic, ordering vision stands counter to the new that resists narration.
As in this interview, the emphasis was on the dynamics between the old and the new, a dynamics that does not correspond to a materialist dialects leading to an ideal synthesis. The emphasis is on the contrast, on the abyss between the two moments rather than on the fullness of a solution. The concept of the dialectic gives way to other concepts— those of contamination and mediation. The gap between past and present,
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history and prehistory, exists, but it is unbridgeable.... The awareness of such a historical gap makes it necessary to rethink modes of intervention ... [112].
Based upon this idea of a reality that resists narration, scholars might begin to rethink the substance behind the obvious juxtaposition between the first and the third world, and East and West, in Pasolini’s Medea by looking at the way he defines the third world and the role of classical mythology in his work.
In a series of interviews in which he claims to “tell the story of my own Oedipus complex,” Pasolini points out the link between a type of highly personal autodescription and his first classical film, Oedipus Rex: “I narrate my life — mythified, of course — made epic by the legend of Oedipus” (Liehm 244).
According to Viano, with Medea, Pasolini plunged into the realm of mythology to such an extent that he abandoned his capacity to evoke contemporary reality as he had in Oedipus Rex and Teorema (237). However, as I have pointed out, Viano’s take on the film is conspicuously at odds with Pasolini’s own description of his intentions in his historical films. In an article written for Cinema Nuovo in 1970, Pasolini wrote, “By its nature film cannot represent the past.... Therefore in my historical films I never had the ambition of representing a time that is no longer: if I tried to do it, I did it by analogy: that is, by representing a modern time somehow analogous to the past” (qtd. in Mariniello 132).8
Mariniello adds that Pasolini’s Medea is informed by an urgency to rewrite history and reject the categories that made it possible.
Pasolini’s depiction of the third world, so important in his adaptation of Medea, was to a great degree infiltrated with his views of the Italian peasantry (largely from the south of Italy):
You must remember that Italy was and still is in a fairly unusual position in western Europe. While the peasant world has completely disappeared in the major industrialized countries like France and England (you can’t talk about peasantry in the classic sense of the word there) in Italy it still survives, although there has been a decline in recent years.... My relationship with the peasantry is very direct, as it is in most Italians— almost all of us have at least one peasant grandfather, in the classical sense.
Now the communists in Friuli were peasants, and this is very important. Perhaps if they had been urban working-class communists the class factor would have been too strong for me and I would have resisted; but I couldn’t hold out against peasant communists, who are the ones who make revolutions, in Russia, in Cuba, in Alge-ria — although they make them in a pre-class way ... this is perhaps why there is such a strangely ambiguous symbiosis, which is also a valid one, as well as being poetic, between the peasantry of the third world and the students here [Pasolini qtd. in Stack 21–22].
Clearly, when Pasolini refers to the third world in his writings or film, he both performs an act of autodescription and refers to an almost mythical, geographical site that incorporates Italian peasantry (or those Italians outside of industrialization and thus, outside of history) with perhaps more remote, foreign communities that fit into his vision of locations that do not correspond to ideas of Western progress. Seen in this light, the Turkish peasant setting
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used to depict Medea’s role as a community leader before meeting Jason takes on the appearance of a particularly colonized space when Jason and his band of men enter the village temple to steal the sacred golden fleece (the object of their travels). Pasolini emphasizes the importance of this encounter by characterizing the arrival of Jason’s men with sadistic violence and carelessness. The men steal the first objects they come upon (horses and jewelry) from nearby farmers. When they reach the village, they dislodge the treasury guard with ease, steal the treasury, and mock the villagers by tossing a single coin to the guard who has been thrown to the ground. There is no resistance to Jason and his men from Medea’s people. In fact, it seems as if an invasion is the last thing they suspected. Jason succeeds in infiltrating the sacred temple alone where he comes face to face for the first time with Medea. Accordingly, Pasolini’s depiction of Jason and his men pillaging Medea’s village could refer to colonial violence inflicted by Italians in foreign lands, to violence committed by neo-capitalist Italians on Italian peasants and foreigners within Italy, or both.
Pasolini was concerned with particular forms of colonialism and exploitation inside and outside of Italy up until his death. Days before he died, Pasolini gave a lecture on Antonio Gramsci in which he attempted to distance himself from charges of traditionalis
m, idealism, and reactionary tendencies whenever he spoke of subaltern cultures:
For Gramsci, it was legitimate to talk about emancipation because he worked, forty years ago, in an archaic world that we cannot even imagine. [...] It was right then ...
because Sardinian shepherds lived in a very particular manner. The difference is inconceivable. So you cannot quote Gramsci as an example of emancipation; you can recall Gramsci as a link in a historic chain that leads us to new questions today.
To propose a new way of being progressive, a new way of being Gramscians. [...]
when Gramsci says genocide ... he takes a position in favor of the victims and against those who victimize them; he takes a position in favor of particularistic cultures that were being destroyed and against the centralist culture that destroyed them [qtd. in Verdicchio 173].
If one follows the logic of the above quote, which refers to recent and ongoing cultural genocides in Italy, it seems more likely that Pasolini is making reference to his contemporary political and cultural milieu in Medea than simply creating an aesthetically pleasing portrait of ancient Asia. In the film, he represents Medea and her ancient homeland as existing in a completely different time period than Jason’s through the use of ancient Turkish cliff dwellings to represent Medea’s village, and Italian medieval dress and architecture to characterize Corinth. Thus, Medea’s village stands in for “particularist” cultures destroyed by “centralist” culture.
In keeping with Pasolini’s criticism of centralist culture and its victims, his queer intervention into the heteronormative qualities of the mythological film genre should not be overlooked. Although it is no longer taboo in film theory to discuss the homosexual aspects of many of Pasolini’s films, explicit links between Pasolini and queer theory are nevertheless uncommon. Viano
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suggests that we should not ignore ways in which homosexuality appears in Pasolini’s films, as many Italian critics have done over the years in order to avoid tarnishing his status as a producer of high culture. Yet simply embracing Pasolini’s homosexuality does not bring us any closer to understanding the degree to which Pasolini’s work troubled and threatened the Italian state: while he was alive, he was dragged into court thirty-one times on charges ranging from obscenity to blasphemy to corruption of minors. He was tried once posthumously, and immortalized by the Italian police as a desecrated corpse in a series of photos they published after his murder. While there may be valid reasons to rescue the homosexual over- or under-tones in Pasolini’s film adaptations of the ancient past, a deeper exploration of the stigma of deviance that marked his own body and body of work is in order if scholars wish to understand how Pasolini can be seen as a precursor to fields such as queer theory.