Pervert icon John Waters once quipped, “I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.” A pervert recovering-Catholic myself, I know what he’s talking about. Prohibition excites. Ban a film and you have a PR wet dream. Ban something inevitable – “impure thoughts,” non-procreative sex, female desire – and you’ll not only make it more appealing, you create a sin-repent cycle that keeps ‘em coming back for over 2000 years. But you don’t need to be raised with religion for sex to be dirty.
Aanilingus – let’s be honest, any sex – is still a verboten topic at dinner tables. “Clitoris” is still a vulgar word according to newspapers. There’s still a global lack of sex education, the stigma of STIs, the censoring of nude art, and a recent trend in hetero-focused books denigrating BDSM, non-monogamy, and pornography. In fact, the idea that the spiritual and the intellectual exist at one lofty pole, and the sexual and sensual at an antithetical trivial one, is so pervasive that most people aren’t even aware of it. Herman Hesse, who explored that doctrine of an eternal conflict between “the flesh and the spirit” in books like Narcissus and Goldmund won the Nobel Prize.
The idea clearly informed my childhood idols: The Madonna, Virgin Mary, mother of God, and Madonna, the 80s pop star who fucks a Black Jesus. And my later fascinations – Caligula, the Marquis de Sade – were shaped by a libertine yearning for unconstrained debauchery in a world which fervently attempts to control even anodyne sexual appetite in women.
Seeing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 allegorical film Teorema (Theorem) as an undergraduate was a revelation. The heterodox Marxist intellectual-poet-novelist-critic, who’s best known outside of Italy as a filmmaker, didn’t simply make an unconventional movie, he made a movie that remains controversial five decades later.
In the film, an insouciant, ethereally-hot Arthur Rimbaud-reading houseguest (Terence Stamp) visits a rich industrialist’s villa in Milan and has sex with the maid (Laura Betti), mother (Silvana Mangano), son (Andrés José Cruz Soublette), father (Massimo Girotti), and daughter (Anne Wiazemsky, then-wife of Jean-Luc Godard). All are existentially transformed, awakened from their bourgeois slumber. The visitor leaves and they struggle to fill his void, unable to return to their inauthentic lives. The mother picks up young men in her car. The son makes piss paintings (a decade before Warhol). The daughter becomes catatonic. The maid levitates. Sulphurous desert montages, bleak leafless landscapes, and a disquieting soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and Mozart create an unsettling tone.
The film’s ending is ambiguous. Are the father’s naked screams into the desert, after giving his factory to his workers and cruising a man at the train station, cries of desperation or liberation?
After its release, Teorema received a Catholic film prize for its “mystical character.” Then, the pope condemned it, it was banned for running “contrary to every moral, social, or family value,” and eventually it was viewed as art. The French, of course, loved it.
What freaked people out most is how Pasolini inverted misogynistic anti-sex ideology, by intimating that non-monogamous (!) sex can unbind the consciousness from vapid consumerism. In Teorema, the camera lingers over The Visitor’s holy crotch as he reads with his trousered-legs spread. Self-knowledge comes not by sexual repression, but from divine corporeal pleasure of an enigmatic stranger-saint. A voiceover recites Biblical verse after the father and visitor do it in the grass beside a lake: “You have seduced me Lord, and I have let myself be seduced. You have violated me and you have prevailed.” The erotic transfigures! “God” is sex! The sexual is spiritual.
Teorema remains radical – a film of sexual heresy – both for its sex-spirit amalgam and because it transcends today’s mainstream understanding of sexuality as a gender-based identity or orientation. In the tersely-dialogued Teorema, the transcendental family affair is Rumiesque surrender – total emotion and feeling – which lives “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing” and gender and sexual personhood and monogamy.
Many were shocked then, to learn that Pasolini was sceptical of 1960s “free love.” He believed it false, foreseeing the sexual commodification that we now have with Tinder and Grindr, saying, “the body had become merchandise.” He also enraged the Left by portraying the bourgeoise empathetically, as people living deeply unsatisfying lives. Openly gay, he outraged people across the political spectrum for his lifelong unorthodox views. He was kicked out of the Italian Communist Party, had 33 lawsuits filed against him, and his ultimate cancellation came in the form of a brutally violent murder that many believed to be a political assassination from both the Left and Right.
As I revisit the visionary 20th century “poet of cinema’s” work this year, during the centenary of his birth, our present moment – even more so than Pasolini’s – feels desperate for heretical thinkers like him, who viewed all human beings as “sacred” in his atheist way. Intellectual artists who are not dogmatists.
Trying to make sense of the film, many have called it satire – their sexual politics couldn’t fathom otherwise. But my favourite interpretation is from Jean Renoir who wrote: “What scandalises people is not the obscenity, of which there is none. The scandal lies in the sincerity.”
Mary Katharine Tramontana is a writer covering sexual politics and culture for The New York Times, Playboy, and other outlets. You can follow her on Twitter at @MKTramontana or on Instagram at @marykatharinetramontana.
Read her previous work for Esquire:
The Long Fight for the Female Orgasm: Revisiting the Sexual Revolutionary Wilhelm Reich
