Restoring Pasolini

Illustration by Mitch Handsone

Ostia, the harbor city of ancient Rome, is noted for its ruins of temples, baths and palaces, constructed in the centuries before Christ, that dot its sprawling landscape. It was on a deserted vacant lot, hard by an obsolete seaplane base in Ostia just 20 miles from modern Rome, that the mutilated, bloody body of Pier Paolo Pasolini, a giant polymath of postwar Italian culture — a filmmaker, poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, political columnist and painter, who frequently celebrated homosexuality in his writings and films — was discovered on November 2, 1975.

In the wee hours of that November morning, a Carabinieri patrol spotted a gray Alfa Romeo speeding and careening wildly down the highway. The police gave chase and ran the car off the road. Inside was a 17-year-old boy, Giuseppe “Pino” Pelosi — a hustler and delinquent known as “Pino the Frog” — who’d been released from prison for auto theft only two months earlier. Pelosi jumped out of the car and tried to run, but was caught and arrested. The Alfa Romeo, it turned out, belonged to Pasolini.

After Pasolini’s martyred remains were discovered later that day, Pino the Frog confessed to having killed him. As a minor, he was given only an eight-year sentence for the crime.

Thirty years later, at the beginning of May, Pino the Frog recanted his decades-earlier confession in a headline-making, exclusive interview with the Italian television network Rai 3. In the wake of this development, the openly gay Italian deputy Franco Grillini (of the Party of the Democratic Left) led a group of 30 deputies demanding, during the Italian parliament’s question time, that Silvio Berlusconi’s government examine the Pasolini murder anew, that the left-wing mayor of Rome put his weight behind a new investigation — and the case was officially reopened. Pino the Frog was deposed by the Roman investigating magistrates freshly charged with re-examining Pasolini’s murder, and he reiterated his new statements to them under oath. The investigation is ongoing.

The impact of Pino the Frog’s recantation on Pasolini’s future reputation cannot be overemphasized. For years, Pasolini’s enormous body of work has been dismissed and compartmentalized because of the alleged cause of his murder in Pino the Frog’s first confession — a fictive S&M adventure gone bad, in which Pasolini supposedly tried to sodomize his putative murderer with a large piece of wood. That improbable version of the assassination, so out of character with Pasolini’s legendary gentleness toward the lower-class youth to whom he was attracted, is now definitively debunked. But one cannot grasp the significance of this revelation without understanding: Who was Pasolini?

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna into a family of modest means and spent his first 20 years in the impoverished native region of Friuli, whose mountains, plains and valleys are in the northeastern corner of Italy, just above Trieste. Pasolini’s father was a fascist and a noncommissioned officer, moving from one garrison to another. (Pasolini later said that, in his 1967 film Oedipus Rex, he told the story of his own Oedipus complex: “The boy in the prologue is myself, and his father, the infantry officer, is my own father. The mother, a governess, is also my own mother.”)

Drafted against his will by the Germans, Pier Paolo escaped and became an active member of the Communist-led resistance to fascism and Nazi occupation as World War II came to a close. Pasolini — who started writing poetry at the age of 7 — began winning poetry prizes at 19, and published his first volume of poems at the age of 20, while teaching elementary school and writing political reportages (especially on the postwar peasant rebellions) and literary criticism for the local newspapers to support himself.

Actively gay from an early age, Pier Paolo, when he was 27, was blackmailed by a country priest, who told him to abandon his left-wing political activities and journalism, or face exposure as a homosexual. Pasolini refused to give up his political commitments, and as a result was arrested by the police for “corruption of a minor” in a case involving a 16-year-old lad, after the priest informed on him. He was acquitted of that charge in a trial that got a lot of ink in the local press, but found guilty of “lewd acts” (in the occurrence, mutual masturbation) and fined. Following that conviction, the homophobic commissars of the Communist Party, fearful for its reputation, expelled him for “moral and political unworthiness” (he also lost his teaching job). But Pier Paolo’s love-hate relationship with the Communists, then Italy’s largest political organization, continued until his death (to the end, Pasolini called himself a “Catholic Marxist”).

Having already published four volumes of poetry, Pier Paolo moved to Rome in 1950, continued to write for newspapers and literary reviews, and accumulated more poetry prizes, of increasing prestige. With his reputation as an extraordinarily talented writer already burgeoning in cultivated circles, Pasolini burst onto the public stage in 1955, winning an instant and widespread notoriety that would not end even with his death, by publishing his first novel, Ragazzi di Vita (“The Boys in the Life”), which became a best-seller. Set in the crushing poverty of the shantytowns that surrounded the Rome of la dolce vita and saturated with literary elegance, it is the story of the uneducated teenager Riccetto and his friends, who hustle “queers” for a little money to make their pointless, wasted lives a tad more bearable. This scorching mirror that Pasolini held up to Italian society’s willfully ignored ills had enormous political resonance, but it was easier for the political establishment to deny the ills by trying to ban the mirror rather than try to cure them.