A high heel, jammed into a human mouth, forever
Sean T. Collins on The Hunting Wives
Like what you read? Sign up for a free or paid subscription. Thanks for being here.
Heil If You’re Horny!
by Sean T. Collins
“If you run [for governor], everything changes. You really want people looking at the way you have fun? The way we have fun?”
“Oh, hell, people don’t care about that anymore. They don’t want a Boy Scout, they want a man!”
—from The Hunting Wives
The libidinal appeal of fascism is a perversely powerful motivator. The thrill of exerting brute force against the weak is formidable and irresistible enough for some people — a sort of death’s-head hedonism that grants its practitioners a nigh-orgasmic sense of autonomy not through giving or receiving physical pleasure, but through inflicting physical pain. Seen in this light, fascism is the ultimate form of liberation. It sets you free not, or not only, from propriety, but from our shared humanity itself.
Artists, however, have long taken “the libidinal appeal of fascism” more literally. Beginning in the 1970s, an entire cycle of art films that eroticized agents of the Axis powers — for varying purposes and to varying ends — flourished, made largely by filmmakers from those countries themselves.
Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties shows an Italian tough guy (Giancarlo Giannini) whose cavalier assumptions about his own machismo are destroyed by the war, and by a sexually predatory female concentration camp guard (Shirley Stoler) who assaults him after he is incarcerated for desertion. Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence uses the unstated sexual obsession of a Japanese officer (Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto) with a British prisoner of war (David Bowie) to show how racist assumptions about the otherized enemy are often shot through with a desire so intense it is transmuted into hatred.
Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter depicts the rekindling of a sexual relationship between an SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the much younger concentration camp prisoner (Charlotte Rampling) he repeatedly raped until she warmed to him, and he to her. It explores the way we derive pleasure from our worst traumas, and how we excuse our own crimes by sheltering them under love’s penumbra. Most infamously of all, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, by the martyred director Pier Paolo Pasolini, reduces fascism’s entire political program to the sexual torture of teenagers by a quartet of middle-aged grotesques. Even beyond the metaphor, one need look no further than Jeffrey Epstein’s guest lists or Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees to understand the truth behind Pasolini’s scatalogical metaphor.