These Foolish Things (Scattered Quotations for the Day)

One of my favorite novelists, Gary Indiana, wrote of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film Salo, that it “is one of those rare works of art that really achieves shock value."

He goes on in a winningly Wildean way to say that "[I]t’s always amusing to read the outpourings of some cultural wastebasket decrying an artist who deploys shock ‘for the sake of shock,’ as if to qualify as a work of art, a work of art has to be something other than a work of art – a tutorial in cherished homilies, an affirmation of quotidian values and so on.”

I have been thinking of Salo quite a lot since November, predictably enough -– it’s a film that seems tailor-made for the Bush era, not to put too fine a point on it.

But the thing that really brought the thought of the film to the forefront of my mind today of all days, was a sudden ghastly shock of memory, that that film is framed by the tune “These Foolish Things” which I had been thinking of already as a nice commemoration of the day. The Salo tie-in made it irresistable.

These Foolish Things

(by Marvell, Strachey, and Link)

Oh will you never let me be?
Oh will you never set me free?
The ties that bound us are still around us
There's no escape that I can see
And still those little things remain
That bring me happiness or pain
A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces
An airline ticket to romantic places
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

A tinkling piano in the next apartment
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant
A fairground's painted swings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

You came, you saw, you conquered me
When you did that to me, I somehow knew that this had to be
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
A telephone that rings - but who's to answer?
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

Gardenia perfume ling'ring on a pillow
Wild strawb'ries only seven francs a kilo
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

The park at evening when the bell has sounded
The Isle de France with all the girls around it
The beauty that is Spring
These foolish things
Remind me of you

I know that this was bound to be
These things have haunted me
For you've entirely enchanted me
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

First daffodils and long excited cables
And candlelight on little corner tables
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes
The song that Crosby sings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

How strange, how sweet to find you still
These things are dear to me
That seem to bring you so near to me
The scent of smould'ring leaves, the wail of steamers
Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you, just you

At the close of his appreciation of Salo Gary Indiana writes of the horror of the film that has its most perfect expression in what might otherwise be mistaken for a saccharine glimpse of hope beyond the meat-grinder it so joylessly cranks us through.

“These Foolish Things” plays on the radio in the otherwise decimated villa of the Sadean libertines. One fascist guard absurdly waltzes with another and the shot fades as they engage in desultory chit-chat.

“Salo is the pessimistic forerunner of The Matrix,” proposes Gary Indiana. “It would be a gross mistake to read the final shot as ‘hopeful,’ since these two boys, who have, in fact, implicitly survived the storm, are completely the products of its ferocity...

"After the war they’ll get married, reproduce themselves and raise good consumers; their children won’t need fascism to learn how to think alike, just TV and the supermarket.

"For all the overblown, pretentious, even corny ideas Pasolini regularly brought to the cinema, in Salo, I think he hit a nerve that hasn’t gone numb since the film first appeared.

"The theatres and video stores of the Western world offer a glut of more violent, more sexually explicit, more frankly disgusting movies that hardly anyone objects to, but Salo remains, to borrow a phrase, off the reservation, proscribed, unacceptable. One can argue with its monotony, its internal inconsistencies and its didacticism, but its power to disturb something buried very deep in each of us is beyond question.

"Salo is the very model of life as most human beings have known it in the 20th century, a metaphor of feudalism as reinvented by the multinational corporation, the military coup d’etat and the mediation of all reality via the symbolic.”

Happy Fools Day, Fellow Fools. And as Springer would say, “be good to one another.”