Salo - Am I the only one who didn't find it disturbing?

I finally got round to watching Salo last week after being told it is one truly messed up film. But the thing is I just found it a little bit camp. I have made some of my friends watch it and they thought it was full on and disgusting and all that jazz. So is there something wrong with me that I didn't feel disgusted? Maybe I have just seen too many movies now, that nothing shocks me...Eh I'm not really sure.

Either way, let me know your thoughts on the film.

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Come on Chief, this isn't no boy scout picnic. See ya' got ya' rubbers!

Tame sh*t. Poop was fake-looking. Coprophagia is just about common practice in this day and age.

More realistic sh*t woulda been nice is all.

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Thread topic should change to the damage of desensitization and the conglomerate effect on the fall of american cognition

Thread topic should change to poop.

A Serbian poop

Disturbed the ***** out of me!

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Haven't seen it. Can't imagine it's much more disturbing than Antichrist. Now that, was one effed up movie.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

Which Antichrist are you talking about? You're not talking about the one directed by Lars Von Trier are you? I watched that and was so bored. Waste of time. Oh and *SPOILER ALERT* when Charlotte Gainsbourg cuts off her clitoris I just saw it at a really lame way to grab the audiences attention. It tried too hard.

Part I: Empathetic Ignorance

No, you're not alone, Oracle. While I understand why people found it disturbing, I didn't. In fact, I think it's more shocking that people are still shocked by it.

It was also thematically haunting and aesthetically hermetic and beautifully composed. Not sure why you're isolating the shocking instances as the film's only artistic merits, accusing Von Trier of basely "grab[bing] the audiences attention" with genital mutilation when what was most startling about the film was how it was already so terrifyingly enigmatic without any explicit graphicity. It is simply not the same sort of viewing experience as Salo or A Serbian Film, despite its reputation as a shock-film.

I wonder if you think you're something superior to the film because you failed to be affected by its shocks. Perhaps if shocks were its primary goal, then you could declare a proper victory. I'd say you were missing most of what was actually at work visually and thematically.

The film would still be one of my favorites with or without the genital mutilation. Certainly those devices are among the film's most, if not only, disposable elements---so concrete and self-consistent do I judge the whole of Von Trier's work.

When it finally got released about 3 months ago, we got it in at work and customers who were buying it were telling me and my staff how messed up it is and how we had to have a strong stomach for it. So when I finally got around to watching it, I was kinda surprised at how camp it was. I didn't take it seriously. I can understand why it was shocking for the time it was released, but there has been more shocking films that have been released since then.

I feel better now, knowing I am not a sick freak then for watching it and not feeling repulsed by it.

what is this movie about?

People find it disturbing because they don't believe that anyone, especially "fascists", should be allowed to torture and humiliate anyone else into doing things which would be against their will unless they weren't threatened with death or something they find even worse. The obsession with feces in the middle third of the movie should be enough to put someone off their lunch, but what I believe most people find disturbing is the film's finale. That scene, where the youth who haven't totally given themselves over to fascist brainwashing, are tortured on screen through the use of burning candles, branding irons, scissors, eye gougers, nooses, etc., while the fascists gleefully watch through opera glasses and fondle the new, successful fascist recruits, is pretty much beyond the pale. Now, if someone cannot take it seriously because one of the guys in charge is cross-eyed or the sadists like to laugh at their dispicableness or dress in drag or whatever, I suppose that is a person's right. I just cannot find any reason why the film was made or why anyone would want to watch it. It does attempt to make some kind of political point but I don't think it's convincing or worth all the literal shite it puts the viewer through.

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Well that's only the case if you choose to think the message isn't a strong one. It's easy to say that the disgusting element of it all was pretentious.