Ambiguous, Undecipherable, Suspended : The Life and Murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Ep.54)

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet, novelist, filmmaker, and one of Italy's most celebrated (and most controversial) figures. He was murdered by a teenage hustler in 1975. Or was he? Well, the murder part happened, but was it committed by the Freemasons? The Catholic Church? The Mafia? The Italian government? Pasolini had a lot of anti-fans. Let's find out.

Music by Pixaby.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Oldie documentary bit about Pasolini/The body
• 2:32 Forbidden movies/Kathy/Salo is effed up
• 5:54 This is Pasolini
• 7:14 Who WAS Pasolini/Facets
• 10:43 Pasolini makes movies
• 13:19 Pasolini's last night on Earth
• 19:07 Pasolini pissed every one in Italy off
• 22:05 The 2000s offered up more info on the murder
• 26:52 The trilogy of death
• 29:31 Outro

Transcript

November 2, 1975, Italy. A coastal promenade by the Tiber River, known as Indroscalo di Ostia, Ostia being a port city near Rome. It’s 1:30 AM, and a cop-soldier in a Carabineiro patrol car (they’re like a cross between the military and the police) has just pulled over a young man driving erratically and speeding in a Alfa Romeo. He’s around 17. 

Eventually, it’s determined that the car was stolen, and the youth leads them to the car’s owner, who is lying dead on a nearby beach. He’s been savagely beaten and bludgeoned, with crushing wounds. The medical examiner will later determine that he’d been run over more than once by his own car.

The youth’s name was Pino Pelosi, and he told cops that this tragic affair started earlier in the evening when the man in the Alfa Romeo had asked him if he needed a lift. Hours later, the man would be a bloodied husk on the beach. And when the victim was finally ID’ed, the cops were shocked.  What exactly had happened to one of Italy’s most famous and controversial poets, filmmakers and activist-intellectuals? Who killed Pier Paolo Pasolini? 

You’re listening to Wicked Gay, a true-crime podcast about gay people doing awful things.

Hello! I’m your host J. Harvey. I’m a horror movie fan, and when I was a kid, I was always tempted by movies of the most transgressive nature (I still kinda am), the taboo ones that you had sneak out somehow and find the VHS or sneak downstairs late at night as a kid to find the right channel on cable. The taboo ones I’d read about in my increasingly macabre movie research, remember we didn’t have Google in our tarpaper shacks back then, I’d be looking through all the books I could and would think I’m going to watch that someday. You know - Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Faces of Death, looking for the dead kid in 3 Men and a Baby. I grew up smack dab in the VHS late-night cable generation. I kind of miss it, actually. There more of a sense of discovery back then, you had to work for it. I’m an inherently lazy person, but this effort was worth it. The horror section in the indie video stores with the most ridiculous, gory and gruesome covers was like a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts for me. 

I remember my best friend’s mom talked up The Exorcist when we were kids, and I was dying to see it, because the stories about it scared me without even having watched it yet, and my bestie and I finally watched it when he was babysitting one night, and she was absolutely right! (She’s also the lovely mom who got me into Stephen King, for which I will always be grateful, bless you, Kathy, and thank you for being a literal cool mom when I was 10, and not the Amy Poehler type. She was the mom in 5th grade who loved Prince and drove a red sports car.) 

Speaking of transgressive movies, the one I ALWAYS wanted to see, the holy grail of these fucked up filmic dares, was 1975’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. In the movie mags and books I read as research through my young adulthood, SALO was always the movie writers said was one of the most disturbing movie ever made. Screw Last House on the Left, and  Cannibal Holocaust, hi - sign me up for Salo!

SALO or the 120 Days of Sodom is based on the Marquis De Sade novel of the same name. It came out in 1975 and shocked a lot of people. Here was a respected filmmaker who had become known for his serious political films interspersed with bawdy literary adaptions, giving sadistic and terrible creative cruelty.  He gave them a film he said in interviews was a film with “no hope.” 

It was set during the final days of Mussolini’s regime and take place in a secluded villa, where these four fascist leaders basically lord it over some terrified teenagers and do whatever they want to them and then some. It’s brutal, and depraved, and really disturbing. It’s an allegory about fascism and how cruel and horrific unchecked power could be. Pasolini styled it after Dante’s Inferno, with it’s various circles. I finally saw it at The Brattle Theater in college oooh boy. Let’s just say one of the movie’s chapters is The Circle of Shit and it lived up to it. Barf.

The movie would go on to be considered one of the scariest ever made. The bad kind. Jump scares are fun. Utter hopelessness is diffrent. After seeing it, I was like who the hell made this and what was wrong with them? 

Anyway, I’m not so much into the transgressive as I’ve gotten older. I think I’m more into the comfortable. 

The guy who directed Salo and several other sometimes controversial sometimes highly lauded films was a Criteron Collection-level dude naed Pier Paolo Pasolini. He was a poet, a novelist, a filmmaker, and a guy you could call a political provocateur. He became infamous in Italy during his time for challenging power structures, defying censorship, and speaking truth to power, as they say. He was a complex, contradictory, brilliant man.. 

In 1975, he was brutally murdered, and I mean brutally; we’re talking running someone over, backing it up, and stepping on the gas again. 

A teenage hustler confessed to the murder, and went to prison (for only nine years) and case closed. Well, yeah but no. Was it a tragic case of self-defense gone particularly awful or something far more sinister? Tonight, we’ll learn about Pasolini and his life and his murder and what might have actually happened to him. 

This is episode 54. Ambiguous, Undecipherable, Suspended : The life and murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

My sources for this episode are wikipedia and Youtube, the Guardian, and the New York TImes

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna, Italy, and grew up in a divided household—his dad was a fascist-supporting military officer, his mom came from a working class background and was much more into art and poetry than supporting dictators. I hear Tiffany Trump’s like that, too. Pasoline would be besties with his mom and was living with her at the time of his murder. She inspired his intense love for the written word and his eventual evolution as a very free thinker. 

Rebelling against his dad’s beliefs seems to have informed his politics. Pasolini was a complex guy.. He was a committed Marxist but openly criticized the authoritarianism of communist states and the Italian Communist Party, which expelled him mostly because he was gay though. Gimme a sec.

While he was an atheist and publicly condemned the Catholic Church’s hypocrisy and their tendency to influence authoritarianism, he was very into religious themes and portrayed Christ with pretty much reverence in his film The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which, despite being written and directed by a an openly gay communist, would go on to become one of the most well-respected and received films about Jesus by the Catholic Church.

Pasolini idealized the working class and despised the bourgeois’s consumerism, yet he criticized the student protests in 1968, arguing that the police (who were often from poor backgrounds) were more oppressed than the middle-class students rebelling against them, which is an interesting take.

He used his films and literature to expose societal taboos, from sexuality to abuse of power, knowing full well they would provoke outrage. His work was frequently censored, and he faced numerous legal battles over it.

He also had very little positive to say about La Cosa Nostra, which, jesus, you’re smack dab in Italy, dude and these people invented cement shoes. You can’t say Pasolini didnt have a set on him.

His homosexuality made him persona non grata in conservative post-war Italy, yet he refused to align with any mainstream LGBTQ+ movement, becxause he saw identity politics as another form of conformity.

He was also, well, you know, one of those.. Actor Ninetto Davoli appeared in several of his films. Pasolini met him at age 41, while Davoli was 15. They began an affair and Pasolni would later refer to him as the love of his life. Their sexual relationship lasted only a few years, but Ninetto was his constant companion for the rest of his life. So - I don’t know. By the way? None of your heroes are heroes. Ask me about how Joss Whedon, Warren Ellis, and Neil Gaiman broke my heart sometime.

Anyway, Pasolini? Complex. 

In the 1940s, he studied literature at the University of Bologna, where he was influenced by poetry and philosophy. However, his life took a dramatic turn when he was accused of corrupting minors due to his homosexuality—a charge that led to his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party. The word is, he was arrested for being caught with minors in a sexual manner. ok, dude, he was a pedophile.  and he was “exiled” that’s in qote to Rome in 1950. In the slums of Rome, he immersed himself in the lives of the working class, an experience that deeply shaped many of his films and poems.

In his early years, he wrote poetry and novels about marginalized communities and the struggles of the poor. His eventually went to work at a movie studio and became a filmamker. early films focused on the same.. By the mid-1960s, he began exploring religious and mythological themes, most notably in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which was considered to be a politically charged Christ bio.

His later films became increasingly freakier and more experimental and a lot more sexual. Experimental and controversial. For instance, 1968’s Teorema follows a wealthy, upper-class Milanese family whose lives are disrupted when a mysterious young visitor (played by Terence Stamp aka Zod, Bernadette and Ralph and if you get those references, you’re aces) shows up. He seduces each family member—the mother, the father, the son, the daughter, and even the maid—awakening deep existential and sexual desires in all of them. After Zod exits, each of them go into a personal crisis: the father abandons his business, the mother fucks around on the dad, the son turns to painting (which maybe not a crisis)  the daughter becomes catatonic (which well, thats a crisis), and the maid retreats into religious mysticism, eventually performing miracles. Go on, maid. You can tell which one Pasolini was most ID’ing with huh?

Zod might have been Jesus, or a destructive force exposing the emptiness of bourgeois life. The film criticized capitalism, sexual repression, and spiritual alienation, leaving the audience to decide if Bernadette’s presence was a blessing or a curse.  

It wasn’t always deep dives into religious allegory featring slutty maybe Jesuses tormenting the rich. He created some sexy and bawdy stuff too. His films the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales and the Arabian Nights, made up his Trilogy of Life and it was all about folk stories and people fucking. The trilogy was pretty popular, and unfortunately, it reminded him why he hated capitalism so he allegedly decided to counter his trilogy of life with a trilogy of death. Salo, his last film, was the first chapter in what sounded like a really morbid project. I’ll get to what he was planning for the other two movies at the end, and ooo boy, especially that last one.

Salo was so brutal and transgressive that it enraged the censors, and the public. Also keep in mind, he was always, always, always using his celebrity power and a weekly newspaper column to criticize the governments, the neo fascists that were in vogue at the time in Italy, and the Church. 

And that might have played a part in his death.

So, Nov. 1 1975, Pasolini has dinner with his bestie and maybe victim but I guess bestie, strange relationships and such, Ninetto Davoli and Davoli’s wife..

..oh yeah, and hot goss - so Pasolini and Davoli had a major falling out during the filming of The Canterbury Tales in 1972 when Davoli left Pasolini’s side to marry a woman. Behind the scenes, this reportedly sent Pasolini into a tailspin, and he began composing nihilistic and angry poetry. For his next film, Arabian Nights, which they had shot and had been released to good reviews the year before, Pasolini had Davoli go full frontal for the first time. Also his character was a selfish and unfeeling man whose rejection of a woman causes her death and which results in his onscreen castration. Besides that part, the film is considered a ligthheated fantasy, so clearly pasolii was working out a revenge fantasy for Davoli leacving him for a lady..

Ok, end of hot goss….so the trio dined in the San Lorenzo section of Rome, near the Termini Railroad Station.

During their dinner. Mr. Davoli said, Pasolini “talked of violence, saying that it has achieved abhorrent proportions, devastating the city.” As they were leaving the restaurant, the actor said, the director told him that he planned to go home, but Ninetto was quoted as saying “I think he changed his mind on the way and instead wanted to go for a ride.”

And this is where 17-year-old petty thief and according to him, first time sex worker Pino Pelosi, entered the picture. Pino was what was referred to a “ragazzo di vita”, that is a young boy who takes part in petty crimes, small thefts and prostitution. Pino was at the nearby Termini Railroad Station  looking to have sex for cash and Pasolini allegedly drove up, rolled down the window, and asked him if he wanted to go for a spin. Pino also quoted Pasolini as saying “"Come ride with me, and I'll give you a present." Oh dear.

Pasolini took him to a restaurant  near St Paul's basilica, where Pino ate spaghetti with oil and garlic, and Pasolini drank a beer. Then Pasolini drove him to Ostia, to a secluded kind of scrappy area beside a football pitch think Ted Lasso, not Gilette. 

 Pino would claim that this was around 11:30 pm and Pasolini proositioned him and Pino wasnt into it, he claimed Pasolini got rough and Pino said he fled the car with Pasolini chasing him,a nd then trying to force himself on Pino. Pino said he picked up a nearby stick and hit Pasolini over the head with it. Pino reportedly told multiple versions of what happened with one of them being that Pasolin had grabbed the stick first telling Pino he was going to sodomize hum with it, and had hit Pino with it first. This stick got a lot of action. Anyway, Pino said he ended up picking up two clublike pieces of wood nearby and beat Pasolii to death with them. As he drove off in Paslini’s Alfa Romeo, he said he ran over what felt like a bump. He admitted to killing Pasolini to not only the cops but a cellmate. He also asked the cops if they had found his gold ring with a red gem at the scene, and they had. 

So, there’s an autopsy, and we learn that Pasoloi’s body was almost unrecognizable, savagely beaten, and run over several times with his own car. Multiple bones were broken and his testicles were crushed by what appeared to have been a metal bar. The autopsy also revealed that his body had been partially burned with gasoline after his death. This didn’t really fit with Pino’s story. Oh, and I watched a pretty good Italian dramatization of the case on YouTube called Who Killed Pasolini. Terrible title, but I was into it. The filmmaker mixes in footage from around the of the crime with the movie stuff, interview with locals, and the police, and he also includes quick shots of autopsy photos and let me tell you that body doesn’t look like it was just hit with a stick.

Most important, the forensic evidence suggests that there were multiple murderers here. And Pino at some point said he had killed Pasoln along with “others unknown.” He later recanted on that part and said it was just him, although he was convicted in 1976, and  on the record he was found guilty alongside “unknown others”. Which is weird, right?

Ohn and fun fact Pelosi was nicknamed “the rana” (the frog) by press during his murder trial for his black, swollen eyes from potential prison fights and crying

The invesigation continues. Multiple eyewitnesses near the crime scene reported hearing multiple voices that night, and forensic evidence later supported this claim. If Pelosi wasn’t alone, who else was there?"

He retracted that story during his appeal, and stayed with the gay panic defense, and the dirty queer Commie had it coming and so on. This didnt fly, or maybe it did because he ended up only serving nine years. 

Pelosi was released on probation in 1983. Following his initial release, he was arrested on different charges of drug-dealing, illegal possession of drugs, thefts, bank robberies. HE ended up running a bar in Testaccio, Rome.

In an interview in 2005, Pelosi completely retracted his confession, which he said had been made under the threat of violence to his family, He claimed that three people "with a southern accent" had committed the murder, but also referred to Pasolini as a "dirty communist"

So, at the time of his death, Pasolini was at maximum Italy and the rest of humanity are corrupt as fuck, and must be stopped stance. 

He was killed the day after returning from Stockholm, Sweden where he had met famed Swedish avant garder director Ingmar Bergman (and despite considereing a non-intellectual, I can’t discern the theme in anything really and im terrible at symbolism, but I have seen some of Bergman’s films and they’re rad - I very much enjoyed The Seventh Seal and Scenses from  A Marriage in particular, The Seventh Seal was dreamy but in a terrifying way). While he was there, he gave a magazine interview where he said "I consider consumerism to be a worse form of fascism than the classic variety."

Pasolini's thougth hyper-materialism was destroying the culture of Italy, which uh, well, yeah, the world, right, I say as I pound this out on my MacAir. . But in the months before his murder, he got way more specific. He singled out television as a terrible influence, predicting the rise and power of a type such as then media-mogul-turned-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi long before well, just look around. He had also written a series of columns denouncing the leadership of the ruling Christian Democratic party as riddled with Mafia influence, predicting kickbacks galore…which sorta kinda prophesied the so-called Tangentopoli – "kickback city" – scandals 15 years later, whereby an entire political class was put under arrest during the early 1990s. 

In his columns, Pasolini declared that the Christian Democratic leadership should stand trial, not only for corruption but association with neo-fascist terrorism, such as the bombing of trains and a demonstration in Milan.

And five years after Pasolini’s death, 82 people were killed due to a bombing at the Bologna tration by neo-fascists allegedly working with the Italian secret services. So basically, everyone Pasolini was railing on about deserved the railing cuz they were blowing up railways.  He was a prophet. 

And word was, Pasolini was mid-investiagation of the Italian government, and about to expose a massive political scandal  inolving the Masons, those guys pop everywhere, the Mafia and high ranking political officals. 

And to round out the whole he was probably killed by anyone than then potential fall guy/innocent dupe Pino Pelos theories, Pasolini’s murder bore some telltal signs of a Mafia revenge hit, Pasoli wasnt their friend and talked shit about them. 

And the killing was incredibly brutal and could have been a warning to people that if you open your mouth, you too could be speed bumped and corpse torched, and thats after we crush your nuts with a wrench. Dont piss off the real Tony Sopranos. 

,So, in the early 2000s lot of previously unknown and hidden information spilled out, and filled some blanks in but also raised more questions, as mysteries often do.

This next part gets a little complicated, but I’m going to try to simp it for you.

In January 2001 an article appeared in an Itlaian daily called La Stampa about the death in 1962, in a plane crash, of a man named Enrico Mattei, who was the head of the ENI, which was this huge multinational energy companu, 

The article's author, Filippo Ceccarelli – one of Italy's expert political journalists – reported that a a judge, had been trying to get to the bottom of some political intrigue within ENI, and found Mattei’s plane had been shot down. The judge implicated the guy who succeeded the dead guy - , Eugenio Cefis, reportedly in cahoots with political leaders. 

The report also noted that this case had been made into a film, and a journalist who had worked on the film had been kidnapped and disappeared without trace.

The article got into the fact that the rumor’s that Pasolini was playing detective in the upper echelons appeared ot be truth, and he made it into a novel, about barely disguised versions of the guys involved, and roped in the MAsons, of which Cefis, was a member.  THis novel was released posthuomousy.

THen in 2005, when Pino Pelosi started talking, he got evern more explicit, saying that two brothers and another man had killed Pasolini,he said they were members of what sounds like one of Italys many many  neo-fascist parties. Three years later, Pelosi revealed connections to even more extreme fascist cells tied to the state secret services, saying he had not previously dared to speak, after threats to his family. Also now there was five men dragging Pelosi from the car, which makes sense considering the autopsy results. 

But wait, there’s more. So, some original reels of Salo had been stolen during filming. Ugh, imagine wanting that as a home movie. And Pasolini had to do reshoots to recreate them. But even after the film was released, Pasolini’s assistant director was trying to them back. He claims he was in contact with a certain gang of young men who were the thieves. Young men who allegedly frequented the same pool hall as Pino Pelosi. 

So there’s thinking that Pasolini was in on this contact and maybe he was killed trying to get his those OG reels of his puke-inducting movie back. 

Or had the Mafia or the NeoFascists or government guys or  those poor beleaguered Masons, jesus one you is Jack the Ripper and you’re just slandered for the rest of eternity, did any of those groups hire the pool hall boys to murder Pasolini?

Oh, and yet another investigation by another writer linked the killers to the famous Magliana criminal gang on the coastal outskirts of Rome

Swirling, swirling theories. Oh, and some moralist naysayers, but naysayers who claim to have actually known him pretty well  said Pasolini was into BDSM and into violence, and maybe sorta kinda brought his death upon himself due to hsi conserting with rough trade, as they call it. You know, Ballgags equal death. Shrug.

The Rome police reopened the murder as a cold case after Pelosi's retraction, but the investigative magistrates responsible for the investigation found that the new elements were insufficient to justify a continued inquiry. As of 2023, a plea to reopen the case was filed based on DNA analysis and links the murder to the Magliana, organisation cuz they have close ties to far-right terrorism,. This new info had prompted a large part of Italy's political and cultural circles to call for the case to be reopened in order to find out out what the hell actually happened. THis was shot down. . Pino Pelosi died on 20 July 2017, of lung cancer.

So, as I’ve said at the end of several other Wicked Gay episodes, I have no clue as to what actually happened to the genius, Communist, way sexually sketchy, poetic, outspoken, hating of injustice and oppression truthsayer Pier Paolo Pasolini.

What is known is that Pasolini was someone who sometimes saw life as meaningless, but was also fascinated with the reality of it, and wanted to keep engaging with it, in addition to being someone who wanted to expose injustice whenever he could. He had his good points.

And I metioned about his alleged plans to counter his trilogy of life film series with a trilogy of death. Well, Salo was supposedly the first film in the trilogy of death and that tracks, the second film was reportedly going to be about the lie of Gilles De Rais, the french nobleman and buddy of Joan of Arc who was also a confessed killer of multiple children and considered the world’s first known serial killer. Then the third movie….well, it hearkens back to Salo’s Circle of SHit. Ugh, I hate toilet talk, so this is like Pasolini punishing me for this episode. 

It allegedly would have been a parable about a modern-day Wise Man and his servant who follow a star in their search for the reborn Messiah in a world of obscene decay.

Pasolini wanted his bestie/former victim/ Ninetto Davoli to play his sidekick. 

In the unmade film, The wise man, who is subtly called Epiphany, travels would have taken him from a Sodom-like city approximating to 1950s Rome in which only homosexual love was permitted to a Gomorrah modelled on 1970s Milan where homosexuality was banned and riotous males robbed and raped. A third city would have been a version of war- time Paris under siege by the Axis powers.

The movie would have stomach churning scenes from a plague he intended inflicting on Gomorrah-Milan which would be in the grip of neo-liberal capitalism. There is a taped interview of him talking about this intended cinematic shitshow. A literal one.

"All the inhabitants are affected by its dreadful symptoms," Pasolini says on the tape about the plague. "Some vomit. Others are affected by interminable diarrhoea and defecate in the street, dying in their own shit. Some die in their own vomit."

The recording ends with him describing how the inhabitants of the Paris in his film, beleaguered by Nazi and fascist troops, commit mass suicide. It sounds very Disney.

SO, yeah, he was a little despairing. And thought the world might have been better off if we led simplet, truer more just lives. Or just died off. Tto close, Pasolini was quoted in 1967 as saying "It is only at the point of death," "that our life, to that point ambiguous, undecipherable, suspended – acquires a meaning."

Thank you for joining me for Wicked Gay, soon you will now hear my pre-recorded blah blah blah end of  stuff. But before that, I will say that I love Cananda, and I hope everyone is keeping their sense of humor, which is kinda easy cuz shit is ridcuous lately huh? And that i love you my listeners, knowing youre out there probably rolling your eyes at this mess and wondering how this himbo thought he should be on the podular airwaves every happened, well, it lifts me up. Goodnigtt.