In late January, I visited Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to watch an infamous, practically unstreamable film. The Lincoln is the hub of old-guard, uptown prestige and culture and the headquarters of the New York Film Festival. On Saturday night at 8:45, prime time for pregaming before a night out, it’s maybe the last place you’d expect to see 20-something socialites. Yet the line outside the Walter Reade Theater on West 65th was full of them, braving the late-winter cold and a light rain for a sold-out screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 49-year-old Italian snuff film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a modernized adaptation of Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century novel. The film is a critique of fascism that at one point features graphic depictions of young, beautiful captives eating bowls of their own shit. There is very little in the way of arc or character development, and—spoiler alert for anyone who had other plans that Saturday night—the film ends abruptly following the sadistic, gleeful slaughter of the prisoners.
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