As always with Pasolini, one has to start at the end. The following story is set during the days leading up to the writer and filmmaker’s mysterious death fifty years ago, and it is no doubt informed and haunted by that tragic event — but more specifically I’d like to start with the end of Walter Siti’s story itself. In the early 2000s, a relatively unremarkable photographer and frequent heroin user in his fifties named Dino Pedriali meets with the scholar editing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s collected writings. The reason for their meeting is both simple and insolubly complex: In October 1975, not long before Pasolini’s murder, Pedriali, then 25 years old, took a series of photos that would become infamous. The captivatingly eerie images — shot at the house Pasolini incorporated into a medieval tower in Chia, over an hour’s drive from Rome — show the writer nude in his bedroom, as if he’s being spied on from the outside by a voyeur. Pasolini told Pedriali, whom he’d only recently met, that the pictures would become part of the novel he was then writing, which had the working titles of Vas and Petrolio. The book, of course, would never be completed because of its author’s murder. What role the photos might have ultimately played in the novel, and what role the novel itself played in Pasolini’s death, are just some of the many unanswered questions regarding the unfinished project.
The scholar overseeing the publication of the ten tomes of Pasolini’s collected works was Walter Siti. According to Siti, the initial spark for this story was not Pasolini’s life and art — subjects he had already had ample opportunities to write about as an academic — but the jarring pathos of Pedriali’s own account. Siti had spent much of his scholarly career coming to know Pasolini through the latter’s own words, but Pedriali unintentionally seemed to offer a reverse perspective, an image of the writer and filmmaker glimpsed in a dark and shadowy mirror. In this way, “The Finishing Touch” is also a means of exploring and coming to terms with the manipulative and transactional side of the artist — especially toward the younger ragazzi who had always obsessed him — without denying any of his talent. Perhaps more than any other Italian artist of the 20th century, Pasolini tends to inspire homages of an often anticritical and primarily subjective nature, so Siti’s complex engagement with this elusive figure is particularly welcome. While we all harbor and cherish our own Pasolini — maybe even one who comes to speak to us at night, providing us with answers to our countless questions — the only certain thing is that had the real Pasolini lived, he would have continued to try to scandalize and shock our sensibilities, forever unwilling to be pinned down.
There’s more to say about Pasolini’s encounter with Pedriali than can be included here, and much more to say about his relationship to Walter Siti, the preeminent scholar of Pasolini’s writing who would go on to become a better novelist than his maestro and, with novels like Paradise Overload (forthcoming from Archipelago Books), an infinitely more honest and self-aware chronicler of the consumeristic commodification of male bodies via prostitution — and not just by power in an abstract sense. In fact, rather than recalling Pasolini’s novels, the following story is imbued most of all with the lyricism of his poetry, which only occasionally transpires in prose works like Petrolio; though Pasolini engaged Pedriali for his novel in progress and fixated on the stolen reels of his last film, Salò, Siti’s version of Pasolini remains “the Poet.” The narrative details, meanwhile, closely follow the facts. One exception is that a prior photo shoot near Pasolini’s other house in Sabaudia took place five days before the more famous shoot at his retreat in Chia; for structural reasons Siti has the two unfold over a single day and night. Most of the dialogue directly reflects or reproduces what Pedriali told Siti, but one line is taken from Siti’s own firsthand encounter, when he and Pasolini met in person in 1972, after Siti had written his undergraduate thesis on Pasolini’s work. There are many topics that Siti (then a 25-year-old gay man, just like Pedriali when he took the Chia photos) wanted to discuss with the man who declared that “to be scandalized is a pleasure,” including Pasolini’s surprisingly tormented relationship to his own homosexuality; but during that day at Pasolini’s apartment in the neighborhood of EUR, in the presence of his mother and the actor Ninetto Davoli, the conversation stuck mostly to work: a chapter of Siti’s thesis that they were editing together for a journal. At the end of the day, Pasolini drove Siti back to Rome’s Termini train station. Before dropping him off, the atmosphere suddenly changed, as he put a hand on Siti’s thigh. Seeing the 25-year-old’s reaction, Pasolini offered the following consolation: “Lucky you, that you’re still able to blush . . .”
— Brian Robert Moore
1.
Eighteen-year-old Mike Tyson: a blooming and satiny explosive leaning nude against the wall. Dino didn’t take the picture himself — it was a gift from a friend from Palm Springs whom he’d met years earlier. How many hopes once placed in art — the myth of Warhol’s factory, the photos of Man Ray’s studio. Back then he had convinced himself that the gallery owners and the people in the film industry supported him more for his talent than for his physique.
Now Dino’s mother passes underneath that penis of Hercules without noticing it; at this point they tease her son at the bar in the piazza, tattooed druggies offer him a glass of Biancosarti and slap a hand on his back (“Hey Di’, how’s it hanging?”). His mania for taking portraits only of nude men has ruined him; he doesn’t have money to pay for the beautiful ones, he has to make do with criminals and the maimed. His mother sits down, drying her sweat. A frustrated and unhappy 52-year-old, that’s what her son has become, with small exhibitions at exotic embassies and cultural institutes. Coke and drunks with AIDS. But everything had started years earlier, with that encounter.
The famous writer and filmmaker, or, better yet, the Poet, was looking for someone who knew Man Ray; he was trying to get authorization to use, in the poster for his film, the famous portrait of Marquis de Sade made of bricks, half Sphinx and half Bastille. At Luciano’s house, he was immediately struck by Dino. A boy in his twenties — bourgeois and yet from a borgata, one of Rome’s suburban slums — he didn’t even come across as a professional photographer. Dino was overly obsequious throughout the evening, clearly aiming to capture another artist for his photo book and willing to concede anything in return. A shame to find him in that den of fairies; but giving a glance at his jeans, faded over his cock and thighs, the Poet proposed a photo shoot for the following Sunday at his house in Sabaudia.
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