Openly gay Italian film director Pier Paolo Passolini (1922-1975) was brually murdered exactly 50 years ago today, supposedly by one of the rent boys he (like Oscar Wilde) regularly sought out. But The Silver Book, a new book by British author Olivia Laing (whose essay collection, The Lonely City, we read five years ago), speculates that the Italian government may have staged his murder to discredit Passolini, a longtime critic. Writing in The Guardian, Laing says:
"What if this reputational as well as actual murder was designed to drown out – contaminate, confuse – the warnings he’d been issuing with increasing ferocity in the final years of his short life? “I know” was the central refrain in a famous essay published a year before his death in Il Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading newspaper. What Pasolini knew, and what he refused to remain silent about, was the nature of power and corruption during Italy’s brutal 1970s; the so-called “Years of Lead”, named for an epidemic of assassinations and terrorist attacks by both the extreme left and right. What he knew, in short, was that fascism was not over, and that the right would metastasise, returning in a new form to claim power over a populace stupefied by the tawdry blandishments of capitalism."
Whatever the truth of that theory, Laing pays tribute to her subject's legacy as an artist, thinker and political force in her essay.
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