That’s what Medea wants Jason to discover: the feeling of losing your children when you are still alive, a feeling that will intensify as you grow older, lonelier.
Being alone with your loved ones is awesome — until it isn’t. And many of us, I’m sure, are finally beginning to understand what the Jack Nicholson character was going through in The Shining. I mean, even without a haunted hotel, even if you are just at home, the fact that everyone is in everyone’s face all the time, day after day, week after week — it’s enough to drive you homicidal, even if only at the thought level. Medea, of course, went one step further. She committed thought to deed. She killed her two young sons, though for a very different reason.
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Anuja Chandramouli
April 10, 2020
Oh man! I adore Pier Paolo Passolini. The man has to be THE bravest artiste in the world. I loved his take on The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. And after his Teorema, Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q came across as extreme wannabe and very deliberately provocative. There is so much raw honesty, sensitivity and beauty in his work. His Salo is seared into my brain and scarred me for life. What a remarkable man he must have been! To take up the subjects he did and to live the way he chose to in a far more militantly intolerant world. Wish you would write a book on his life and work BR!
As for Medea, I have only read the Euripides version and haven’t seen the movie versions. Perhaps I will check out Passolini’s take on it.
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brangan
April 11, 2020
Anuja Chandramouli: If you like SALO, you’ll really like MEDEA. You’ll have to know the story though, for this is an imagistic interpretation — not really a “narrative”. But then, his films rarely are.
Oh, and TEOREMA! 🙂
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Anuja Chandramouli
July 19, 2020
So I did watch Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (Thanks for the recommendation BR). And Edipo Re. Definitely preferred the latter. Small surprise there, since Sophocles is my favorite among the big 3 and I used to be obsessed with his plays (that Women of Trachis!) especially Oedipus, the King in my college days. I thought that in typical Pasolini style, he stayed faithful to the original for the most part, while richly layering the material with his own brutally harsh insights into the primitive core of human nature and a trademark staunch refusal to look away from the naked truth in all its unvarnished squalor, that makes his art so painful and pleasurable to watch.
The prologue was something special. In a bold, brazen move, we see a mother suckling her child and given that we know what is coming, how can this natural act of tenderness and nurturing be conceived as anything less than sexual? No wonder the father is bitterly jealous enough to want to do away with his own offspring! Yet, Pasolini judges neither Oedipus nor Jocasta. Oedipus especially is depicted as someone who goes where his base appetites lead him. There is nothing of the subtle intellect which sees him get past the sphinx in the Sophocles version or the undeniable nobility and courage that distinguishes him as the greatest tragic hero there ever was.
And of course, his attempt to thwart destiny brings him inexorably closer to it.
The crown sits stiffly on his head and that ridiculous beard seems to make it clear that Oedipus is merely playing at being a King who gives a crap about the difficulties of his dying subjects and would be perfectly content to let them all go to hell as long as he can go on making love to Jocasta in peace. I daresay Pasolini seems to be suggesting that the only crime is to get caught, when forbidden passion is dragged out from under the comforting cover of darkness where it thrives best to the unforgiving light of day. It probably explains why Oedipus and Jocasta do the things they do, while being ignorant (willfully?) about their situation though both have enough pieces from their pasts to put it all together not to mention, their knowledge of the prophecy which hangs over both their heads and casts its tall shadow over their lives.
Jocasta at least, tries to preserve her state of ignorance (a subtle feminine instinct for survival?) though Oedipus is compelled to seek out his own doom. (What if he hadn’t gone looking under stones best left unturned? Nobody in their world and ours would have been wiser to this ‘abominable crime’ against the Gods and man and they would have been just another couple who grew old together lamenting the fate of their unfortunate subjects dying of the plague when not making love or bickering unworthy of the attention of a great like Sophocles). But even as they inch closer and closer to the unspeakable truth and Tiresias tells Oedipus the unthinkable, neither Oedipus nor Jocasta can keep their hands off each other, the suggestion of impropriety and forbidden desire, merely fueling their need. And Jocasta only kills herself when she realizes that Oedipus, her husband and son has found out that it was she who had placed him on the path to hell with her decision to save her own life by handing him over to the servant and issuing a death sentence (quite an inspired departure from the source material. A mother’s ‘unconditional love’ was always a myth and for someone who drew so much from the mythology which clearly inspired him, Pasolini seemed committed to tearing them down while doing his part to preserve them.)
Knowing that he is to be cast into a hell of his own making, Oedipus puts out his own eyes with that heavy pin belonging to his mother/wife perhaps hoping from the depths of his abject hopelessness that an eternity of suffering would cleanse him of his infamy. And so he wanders, ever restless, in endless circles harking back to the restlessness of the spirit which put him on this path in the first place as he repeatedly quelled his own chances for happiness, first by walking out of the cocoon of his adoptive parent’s love and then refusing to leave well enough alone when he got his innermost wish to replace his father in his mother’s bed. Bravissima Pasolini! Bravissima!
Medea is a lesser effort IMO. Euripides at least milked the whole ‘hell hath no fury’ concept for all its worth and made much ado over the anguished need of the infamous Sorceress for revenge which drove her to such depths of depravity. It was hard to see the haughty, chilly Maria Callas being hopelessly and helplessly enamored of this bland and passive Jason allowing him to take her in a shabby tent in the middle of a wasteland. Pasolini’s penchant for mind – numbing violence ought to have been a good fit for Medea but those scenes of ritual human sacrifice in Colchas felt somewhat affected. Which is not to say that there were no harrowing moments here… The dual interpretation of Glauce’s death were both strangely stirring and only a mind like his could conceive of a mother rocking her sons to sleep with infinite tenderness before stabbing them to death.
There are few filmmakers who have a similar insight into the indulgence of illicit desire (dictated by a spiteful society with its hypocritical disregard for more liberal natural laws) and its eventual culmination in doom the way Pasolini did. I love him for it and in light of the tragic fate that overtook, I can barely stand how much my heart still bleeds for him.
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