Cover image: IMDb
There are some criminals who society choose to embrace with a certain degree of reverence. For instance, there is the working-class man who breaks free from a cycle of poverty by defiantly resisting the rule of law, transforming himself into a wealthy, wanted, and sexually desirable icon of revolt—all before dying a beautiful, violent death that prevents him from ever having to grow old, keeping him in the fire of his youth forever. Accattone, however, is about the other type of criminal—the unglamorous and filthy pimps and petty thieves who live just as much in squalor as anyone in the “legitimate” world. Their lives are nasty, boring, ugly, and typically do not end with a glorious death. Set amongst the Roman subproletariat with the use of real locations and an almost exclusively nonprofessional cast of actors, Accattone (Italian roughly for “young thug”) may seem like a textbook neorealist drama – but in reality it is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reaction against neorealism. It is a piece of pure realism imbued with a mythological reverence for the human experience.
Early Pasolini films were written in a thick and blurry Roman dialect most of the neorealist movement ignored. Pasolini harbored a deep-rooted distaste for what he called lingua dei padroni, the “language of the masters,” or bourgeois standard Italian. On his mother’s side he was born into the bourgeois gentry of Fruili’s “petit rentier” class, but he drew distinctions between pastoral wealth and the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. He was raised amongst Germans and Jews, and even carried some Jewish blood from his great-great-grandfather, a fact that may have influenced his political development. Pasolini’s father was a fascist army officer and degenerate gambler whom he didn’t see much. After graduating from Bologna University in 1943, Pasolini moved with his mother to an ancestral home on the Yugoslavian border. His earliest poems were written in the Friulian Austro-Italian country dialect, a dialect that he carried with pride as a symbol of anti-cosmopolitanism.
In 1949, Pasolini was charged with “corruption of minors and obscene acts in a public place,” a charge almost certainly related to his involvement in pederastic circles. He was expelled from his local branch of the Communist Party for his homosexuality and his Catholicism, and fled with his mother to Rome, the city whose violent underworld would provide him with material for his subsequent poems and novels. The Ragazzi, which brought Pasolini fame in Italy in 1955, is a series of fast-paced cinematic vignettes detailing the development of a group of boys growing up in the Roman criminal underworld. As an itinerant Roman poet, novelist, and occasional screenwriter, Pasolini’s obsession with violent criminality was at heart Romantic, as he made clear in allusions to both Percy Shelley and his lifelong hero, Antonio Gramsci.
In a 1968 interview with Oswald Stack, Pasolini described his biggest grievance with neorealism as its naturalism; he saw this naturalism as directly influenced by the verismo of 19th-Century Italian literature, which he regarded as a mere expression of bourgeois culture. A lifelong adherent of Gramsci, Pasolini subscribed to the philosopher’s theory of social hegemony, which suggested that naturalism, while sympathetic to the plight of the proletariat, nonetheless depicted the world through the eyes of the bourgeoisie. Pasolini himself has been described as a “petty bourgeoisie intellectual of petty rentier origin,” referring to his rural birth. It was only as an impoverished scriptwriter in Rome in the 1950s that he became an avowed leftist, writing The Ragazzi and A Violent Life (1959) about the depravity of the Roman subproletariat, organized crime, and the city’s homosexual nightlife. In directing his first film, the Marxist singled out Dryer, Mizoguchi, and Chaplin as the only three “epic directors – not epic in the Brechtian sense of the word; I mean epic in the more mythic sense of the word.” These directors, he continued, were “absolute, essential, and in a certain way, holy, reverential [sacrale].” The religious fervor of the proletariat.
Accattone ceases to be naturalism – a form of looking at the proletariat like a scientist through a microscope – and begins to be a religious epic when the music of Bach is introduced. As these men, men who sell their women to survive, slam fists into each other in a flurry of dust and dirt, Pasolini employs his choral symphony. In that single moment the brute physical entanglement is gifted with the quality of classical transcendence. It was audacious and bold of the director to imbue a dirt-poor pimp with Christlike qualities, especially for a self-professed Marxist who was by all accounts expected to be an atheist. But Pasolini was a Catholic fanatic, and was obsessed with the link between Catholicism and communism; whether or not he was a legitimate Christian, he was consistently fascinated by the “epic-mythic-fantastic” level of belief he found in the extremely poor.
The religion of the poor, Pasolini argued, was entirely different from the religion of the bourgeoisie. He describes the Catholicism of the peasantry as “a magical culture where miracles are real,” a cult that includes the miracle of birth, the madness of erotic passion, the mysteries of violence and death. Within these innately sacred experiences, Pasolini sees the only power capable of countering bourgeois materialism. Accattone, the titular pimp of Pasolini’s first film, embodies the sacred-profane dichotomy that underlies so much of human life. With his girl in prison and his son estranged from him, he needs some way to continue pimping – he finds this in Stella, an innocent and pious virgin whom he begins dating, slowly waiting to turn her into his whore. When he falls in love with Stella he becomes self-loathing and suicidal, not wanting to give her away—she is, for the entire film, the only character untainted by malice or violence, like an Angel walking through hell.
“As Italian society, concluded the transformation into an industrial country,” the director once said, “the people and the bourgeoisie merged into that monster called mass . . . the mass became my addressee, and that’s why I rebelled . . . and began shooting more difficult films.”
