His colleague Michelangelo Antonioni remarked that Pasolini had become “the victim of his own characters.” Completed weeks before he died, at 53, Pasolini’s last movie, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” an unrelentingly brutal adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s catalog of degradation and torture, came to be viewed, all too neatly, as a death wish.
In other crucial ways, though, the meaning of Pasolini remains undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended. A lapsed Catholic who never lost his religious worldview and a lifelong Marxist who was expelled from the Communist Party for being gay, Pasolini was an artist and thinker who tried not to resolve his contradictions but rather to embody them fully. With his gift for polemics and taste for scandal, he was routinely hauled up on blasphemy and obscenity charges and attacked by those on the left and the right.