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So bizarre and symbolic its brilliant (Spoilers)


Here's my jumbled take on the meaning of the film: The pigs represent the Jews/ Commissars and the son (Julian) pays for the Nazi collaboration of his father (Klotz) by being eaten by pigs. The blackmail deal Klotz made with Herdhitze to cover up Julian's bestiality represents the collaboration between the Nazis and big business in the Nazi's rise to murderous power. The dead Russian Jews executed for Nazi "science" come back as the "pigs" that kill Julian. The medieval half of the film with the wandering killer cannibal is meant to show the spectre of war/fascism/capitalism as a tormentor of the workers/peasantry.

My votes:http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=9422378

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Good reading.

I do think the desert cannibal is more closely linked with Julian, which we should take from the mirroring of their deaths. Clementi's character represents a fantasy of true rebellion ("I killed my father, ate flesh, quiver with joy") no longer available to the youth of the modern day. Julian's responses to the capitalistic status quo are either obedience or overt protest, which in the case of Ida's demonstrations, is absorbed and forgotten quickly. Any crime, even the most horrendous (the Holocaust) or most perverse (intercourse with pigs) can be covered up, subsumed into the drive for more profit, more consumption (the new Klotz-Herdhitze empire). After we learn Julian's death left no trace, Herdhitze exhorts us, the viewers, to keep silent about the real of society - inescapable, often violent, economic exploitation emblematized by his own awful participation in the murders of Jews. Other films of the sixties (Hitchcock's Marnie comes to mind) make a similar point about the stain of violence that lies at the heart of civil society.

I think we should also tread carefully in reading the symbolism of Pasolini's films, as he consciously strove to create "inconsumable" films in which the viewers participated in the meaning. At one point in Pigsty, Julian asks, "What do our dreams mean, besides that they make us eager to know the truth?" Pasolini's films drive us to interpretation, but as a whole, they remain productively incoherent.

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