Judges 19 and Extreme Cinema

"Texts of terror" in conversation with extreme horror

Photo by Jonatan Moerman on Unsplash

Once upon a time, a Levite had a concubine. She had other ideas about the relationship and left him to go home. After some time, the Levite went to go get her, and her father welcomed him in. The woman’s father kept insisting he stay longer before he left with his concubine, but finally the man got fed up and left. He left with his concubine, his slave, and two donkeys. The three of them tried to make it to a city of Israelite, where they thought they would be safer, and eventually arrived in Gibeah, planning to spend the night on the square. An old man found them and urged them to come stay with him. While they were at the old man’s house, the men of the city came to assault the travelers. The old man, instead, tried to give the men his daughter and the Levite’s concubine. When the men at the door refused, the Levite threw his concubine outside. The next morning, the Levite tried to leave, but his way was blocked by the body of his concubine, who had staggered back and was dead or near death on his door. The Levite put what was left on her on his donkey. At home, he cut her into twelve pieces and sent them to every tribe, calling on them to avenge this atrocity. When the Benjamite will not give up the rapists and murderers, God urges the other eleven tribes to go to war with Benjamin and defeat them in battle. Then there is a problem about what to do to keep the Benjamites from not dying out. The Israelites have all promised they can’t marry their daughters. So, the Israelites start by killing all the men who didn’t muster against Benjamin and giving them their women. When that’s not enough, they raid a local festival and take those women too. In those days, Israel had no king – everyone did what was right in his own eyes. This is the word of God, thanks be to God, Judges 19-21.

This story is slow, with a lot of delays and a lot of tedious details dragging out the suspense – there’s a lot of arguing about who has what food and who is sleeping where and when. It is ominous, clearly building to something. There’s a lot of horrible irony, calling back to Sodom and Gomorrah, and the belief that the Levite and his entourage will be safe with his own people. The role of the Levite himself is obscure – he himself puts the concubine outside and seems to be content to leave her. Is it revenge? Later he completely disavows his responsibility for her death, even though he had the opportunity to stay the night with his concubine’s father and make the trip in a day – as well as to refuse to hand her over to rapists. It’s a horribly violent, sad story that spirals into worse and worse violence.

And here I am holding the bag needing to write about it. 

Yep, my coauthor gave me this passage. May she step on a thousand rakes. (Hi M, this is a joke, you’re great and I love you.) I must have to say something about it. And I don’t want to. 

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom

The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage is a book that the Marquis de Sade was working on at the time of his death in 1785 and was released upon its discovery in 1904. The novel is about four rich men who decide to gratify their worst sexual instincts. To do this, they kidnap twenty young victims and spend four months locked in a castle raping and torturing the victims to their hearts’ content. The libertines amuse themselves by hearing stories from four sex workers, who report on the most depraved clients they have ever seen, and then act those behaviors out with their captives. The book is violent, scatalogical, graphic, and hideous as these four men endeavor to experience every extreme sex act known to humanity. 

Now, here’s the thing. The Marquis de Sade is the man for whom sexual sadism is named for. He has attracted attention from some notable intellectuals you might be familiar with, like Michel Foucault, Camile Paglia, and Andrea Dworkin. Some have seen him as a transgressive free-thinker or satirist, and others have seen him as a voice of violence and objectification of women. 

Whether or not you see Sade as a free libertine or as a rapist will probably have a lot to do with 1) how much you care about old French porn and 2) what side of the debate you are more drawn to – to the free expression of sexuality that flouts social niceties, or to the very real issues of power that are present whenever a French nobleman beats a scullery maid. (It probably also has a lot to do with whether you’ve seen Quills, starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, and Joaquin Phoenix.) Here’s the thing. I’m not going to take sides in this debate, because I’m not an expert on this subject and God help me if I ever am. But there’s a man who definitely did take a side in this debate, and his name is Pier Paolo Passolini.

Passolini (1922-1975) is probably best known in religious circles for his spectacular The Gospel According to Matthew (1964). Passolini was a lover of the pastoral, the common, and the natural. He was an avowed communist whose films centered the little guy. It’s all over The Gospel of Matthew. And Passolini saw something in Sade that he needed to take down a peg. It’s unavoidable that Sade saw his libertinism as in part a product of his noble birth – he had a right to do as he wished because he was born in the class of people who could. And if there is one thing communists hate, it’s… well, it’s that sort of thing. 

And so Passolini adapted Salo (1975). The book is no longer centered in the Black Forest, it’s set in Fascist Italy. The libertines are no longer wealthy noblemen, they are religious leaders, hereditary authorities, and elected officials. They kidnap eighteen youths from the area around the castle. And they systematically, brutally, and unblinkingly torture them to death. 

The movie is a clear thumb in the eye of any pretentious belief that a birth to power gives you a right to do as you please. It also steps on the levers of power in Passolini’s own society, democratic and religious alike. It lumps all these people in with the fascism that Passolini saw rising again in his own society. Passolini’s hatred of Americanism and the exporting of American culture also may be present in a number of scenes, particularly in the extended sequences of the prisoners eating barbed food and eventually human excrement. For Passolini, the exporting of American customs and particularly dietary practices were an export of horror – raping the countryside, poisoning diets, exploiting the poor for its own ends. 

The movie was banned in multiple countries at the time of its release – most noticeably by British film censors, who were really heating up in the 1970s. However, today it is hailed as something of a classic not just in the world of extreme horror cinema (where it absolutely has pride of place) but in art cinema as well. The Criterion Collection released in on laser disk in 1993 and on DVD in 1998. 

On November 2 1975, three weeks before Salo premiered, Passolini was found beaten to death, struck by his own car, covered in gasolene, and set on fire. His murder has never been solved. A seventeen-year-old boy confessed to the murder, but retracted his confession in 2005, saying that he had been urged to do so at the hands of fascists, who resisted Passolini’s communist message. 

Salo is thus Passolini’s last word in cinema – arguably, his last scream. Whereas earlier Passolini films celebrate the countryside, the rural, the pastoral, the pure, and the poor, Salo rises up against and skewers the forces that threaten it. It is an angry movie, and it is a nihilistic movie, and it is a movie that stands to accuse the people who finally killed Passolini himself. 

And I have never seen Salo. 

Because why would I? Look what I just wrote about it. Don’t I sound like I’ve seen Salo? Isn’t that enough? The amount of literature that has been written about Salo boggles the mind. Salo’s place in arts and letters, particularly in horror, is firmly secured. Anyone who wants to know the story of this movie, how it came to be, why it exists, and what happened to its director, has mountains of texts to go off of. If you don’t want to watch it, you don’t have to. 

And that is how I feel about Judges 19. 

I am out of things to say about Judges 19. And so, I think, are we all. The legacy of Phyllis Trible and her book Texts of Terror is wide and deep. This passage circulates in a thousand seminary syllabuses a year, relating to the subjects of gender and the Bible, violence and the Bible, texts of terror and the Bible – lists of passages that, I must confess, are not different enough from the “20 Most Disturbing Movies” or “20 Most Disturbing Novels” that permeated the horror community year in and year out. Extreme media exists, and there are things to say about it. But surely the right of any individual reader to opt in or out transcends all these things. 

I have not seen Salo because I have nothing to say about it. The possibility that I would is dwarfed by the experience the film would put me through. I hand my ticket back. I have no interest in seeing it. 

And I think this is a perfectly valid response to Judges 19.