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Why kill myself, thought Louise. If life is nothing and death is nothing, why make a lateral move?

If humans were entirely subjective, the only truth she had access to was subjective truths and not objective/ultimate truths. Everything is true from a particular perspective, and also everything is false from a particular perspective. And around this point in her reverie was when the nihilism kicked in…truth’s truthfulness didn’t matter so long as the lies weren’t affecting her directly.

Remy saw her as an artist simply by being female, doing what women had always done: creating life. The thought was far too simple to be Catherine’s invention, but that was the power of the blues, the yellows, to make the mundane into something revelatory.

“Think about life as a fence,” said Miss Winkle. “And each time we transgress, each time we hurt one another, we must tap a nail into that fence. When we’re ready, we can pull those nails out of the fence. But even still, there will be holes.” “Can the holes be fixed?” asked Bud. “Can they be patched?” Miss Winkle shook her head. Bud’s shoulders sunk.

“Am I really the woman of your dreams?”
“Who cares!” said Bud. “You’re the woman of my reality.”

“Scarcity fosters desire,” the man went on. “That’s true of parties and it’s true of business…”

Death was a problem Harper could not solve. The girls at school were vicious to weirdos, outcasts, and outsiders. God is to grace as schoolgirl is to cruelty. So Harper connected with the other outcasts and outsiders.

..death is just another job.

They will say he was a masochist who loved death. They will say he was a sadist who deserved what he got and they will make that kid a hero. Who killed Pasolini? I will tell you. Everyone.

He says: What I mean is, I go down to hell and I discover things that do not bother other people. But be careful. Hell is rising and it’s coming at you. He says: Everybody knows that, as a person, I do pay for what I say. But there are also my books and my films that end up paying for me. Maybe I’m wrong after all, but I keep on thinking that we are all in danger.

He says that he is not interested in the culpability of individuals. He says that it is a total system.

He thinks consumerism is a new fascism because there is so much violence hidden inside it, because it destroys nature and natural behaviour.

He’s listened to Pasolini talk about it, how cinema harvests reality, gathering up what would otherwise decay and die. Film is captured time, time arrested.

The boys Pasolini chases are all the same. They are the same boy, infinitely reproduced. Perhaps there was an original once, up in the hills. Pockmarked, slim-hipped, cunning, poor.

Comme une porte ouverte sur les allées d’un jardin enchanté,

what my ambiguous love of liberty was against. What is his ambiguous love of liberty against? Boredom, convention, stasis.

the past is not past, that there is a porosity to time that talk of historic eras, discrete moments succeeding one another, can only imperfectly conceal. This age, that age, the war, the economic miracle. Salò is a new account of time, the perpetual wounding present of I will take.

..Pasolini says, we are demonstrating that facts are immaterial in fascism, that truth is dead, that meaning is on a permanent migration.

Pasolini explains something of his theory of the montage versus the long shot. The montage is subjectivity, provisionality; the long shot is objectivity, clarity, resolution. The montage is the disorder of life; the long shot is the clarity of death. Which is true though? Which best represents reality?

..he is totally alone, and that the film is coming from this desperate place, this place of desolation. If it’s hard to watch, how much harder to live. Make the film, he thinks to himself. Make it like an exorcism. Then let’s see where we are.

There is no such thing as the past, Pasolini likes to say. It constantly invades the present. Danilo believes this is true. He knows what happened in Salò isn’t over. He knows how easily it could return. Fascism never really went away, it just changed form, went underground, periodically exploding back into the daylight.

Our life is up against the wall, he says. But you’re talented, Nico. Live and work. Work and live. It’s the only answer I can give you because it’s the only answer there is. And in answer to that Nicholas kisses him back, open-mouthed, his eyes pink, his lashes still gluey with tears.

Dani, who spent his own adolescence in a city and under a regime where homosexuality was punished by exile and violence, has a pretty good idea of what getting by entailed. It’s not a story you can kiss better, but he kisses him all the same, wrapping both arms around his slender waist.

me. I know you asleep, Dani says. I watch your face every day. I couldn’t be gladder that I found you.

People can walk on the moon and I can’t kiss you in the street in daylight.

The hare is a symbol of homosexuality, someone else says. Always on the run, always laying low. Did you know every year he grows a new asshole.

Symmetry is essential in this film. Symmetry means no escape, no possibility of escape,

He loved walking into restaurants with his arms around them too, the little dissipated hippy who played Giton practically falling out of his clothes. Creating a scandal, not following through. Danilo checked. He knows. No dicks were touched in the making of this movie.

Proximity, voyeurism, re-enactment. Take those golden English boys in Satyricon: Fellini loved to play with them on set, instructing them how to kiss, telling them when to stop. Up, down, up, down, his eyes gleaming, his voice caressing.

Nicholas’s favourite moment in cinema ever is when Marcello Mastroianni walks down the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita in his white suit and black shirt, looking like the devil, and finds the corpse of a monstrous fish, weirdly washed up on the sand. He has masturbated more than once to the memory of that dissipated face. It goes beyond narrative, beyond realism. It’s pure image, out on a limb.