You know, I have got to wonder if anybody on the Internet has actually written a review of Caligula. On the Internet, at least, I haven't seen anybody really hunker down and take it seriously as a film. Modesty be damned, that is a major reason that I continue to write on "I Viddied it on the Screen." Nobody else is doing it. I think most people see the film as 1) the last dying breath of the legitimatization of adult films into the mainstream and 2) simply a colossally bad movie.

The first charge is interesting. Boogie Nights argued that video killed any hope for pornography to be accepted as a legitimate art form; once these films were not required to shoot on celluloid, there was little incentive for the producers to waste money doing so. Why go to a theater when you can stay in the comfort and anonymity of your own home? Radley Metzger, Gerard Damiano and the Mitchell Brothers were the luminaries of the period; hope for porn's legitimacy laid and more or less died with them. In Sight and Sound's 2002 poll for the top ten films ever made, Trevor Steele Taylor from South Africa listed Gerard Damiano's infamous Deep Throat. Joel David from the University of the Philippines put Damiano's less popular but much better critically received The Devil in Miss Jones and Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven on his list. David suggests that his inclusion of the films in his list is meant to be provocative though, saying that these two films are better then Orson Welles' Citizen Kane because Citizen Kane is a little too "white guy whiny" for his tastes. Further documenting these filmmakers' ultimate failure in being accepted by the mainstream popular culture is that I haven't seen their films because I cannot get access to them. And these films are curiously buried in the Internet Movie Database's search engine. They have pages, but you have to dig a little to find them.

Caligula, on the other hand, is easy to find and view. Putting aside the fact that the mainstream regards it as terrible, it at least has an opinion towards it. Audiences seem to be forced to regard it not as much as a porno with artistic qualities, but as an art film with pornographic qualities. I fear that I may simply be colored by hindsight, but I don't think that my reviewing of this film would seem that much as out of place as reviewing one of Damiano's pictures. The film is, in fact, a legitimization of hardcore pornography then. Perhaps not a very successful one, perhaps one dependent mostly on the names in the credits (Helen Mirren, Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud, and probably even Penthouse), but a legitimization all the same. It broke through by sheer moxie.

Now to the question as to whether or not it's any good. Well, it's putting it lightly to say that the film is incredibly excessive. One of the funniest gags on In Living Color were those newscasts where the reporter is going on about some important story, but Jim Carrey is behind her mugging at the camera. That's sort of the gag in Caligula. The film has a plot and a story, but you wouldn't know it because while the characters discuss Roman politics and move things along with exposition, there is an orgy going on behind them. The picture is aggressively, hatefully, nonsensically shocking. However, the sort of ironic distance that you can use to get through (and even enjoy) the Miike films works for a short while in Caligula, but it doesn't carry through all the way. The film is just too bleak and too cruel. At slightly over two and a half hours, the film moves surprisingly fast and actually gets better the more you soak in the atmosphere. But there isn't really any perspective to it. I never really felt that I related to any of these people, nor did I really care about them. It's a profoundly inhuman movie that exists primarily as a concept.

Does the film compare with Fellini Satyricon? No, that film betrayed some sort of warmth. Does it compare with Salo? No, that film betrayed some sort of humanism. Does the film compare with The Devils? No, that film betrayed some sort of sense of humor. Does it compare with Larry Clark's Kids or Bully? No, those films betrayed something akin to humanism, warmth, humor and even eroticism; the teens in them were sloppy with sex and violence. Can you pick up the problem? The greatness and, I think you could argue, the drawback of those films (and they are all great pictures, superior to Caligula, mind you) is that there was some kind of perspective behind them.

Much (but not all) of the effectiveness of this film can then be attributed to its conflicted history. The film began as a script by Gore Vidal, commissioned by producer Franco Rossellini. Rossellini couldn't afford to produce it so they went to Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. Guccione, wanting to branch out into film production and having dipped his toe in the world of film financing (he ponied up part of the funds for Chinatown), agreed to finance the film if Vidal would add some hardcore porn scenes the script. To direct, Vidal originally wanted Paul Morrissey. This proved impossible, so he turned to Nicholas Roeg, who turned him down. Guccione approached Lina Wertmuller, but she was writing her own version of Caligula and didn't want to shoot anybody else's. That's when Guccione got the relatively no-name Tinto Brass, whose erotic film Salon Kitty impressed Guccione. Vidal's original conception for Rome was something gritty, hyper-realistic and decidedly "non-MGM." Guccione ignored this entirely and hired the flamboyant Danilo Donati, who had previously done Fellini Casanova, to make the sets. Vidal reluctantly approved the designs.

During filming however, Brass and star Malcolm McDowell completely changed Vidal's idea of Caligula. Again, Vidal's vision went against the grain; he saw Caligula doing horrible things out of sheer boredom and out of a misunderstanding of the scale of his actions. Brass and McDowell saw this as banal. A friend of Rossellini, Brass liked his original conception better which saw Caligula as a bit of a Marxist revolutionary (?!), feigning madness to persecute the corrupt ruling class and bring about revolution from the masses against the status quo. The final straw came when Gore did an interview in Variety saying that the screenwriter is the true auteur behind a film. Most directors, he said, are parasites. It's the job that they give to the brother-in laws. Brass and McDowell threatened to walk. To appease them, Guccione agreed to have Vidal barred from the set. Refusing to compromise his script any more and not being able to see the dailies, Vidal requested to have his name taken off the credits. Oh, but there's more.

Guccione wanted Brass to film some scenes with some Penthouse models that he flew in, but Brass refused. After filming wrapped Guccione snuck into the studio and shot the extra footage himself. There was more tension when Brass' wife led a strike for back pay. Brass later conducted his own strike when Guccione fired an extra. Guccione saw the solidarity of director, cast, and crew as insubordination. Knowing little about the art of filmmaking, Guccione made hilarious complaints about Brass' direction. It was too dark (it hadn't been color-timed), was overly delayed (Brass refused to shoot on sets until they had been constructed) and overly indulgent (Brass shot using four cameras and shot 120 hours of film). When it came time to edit, Guccione had little qualms about locking Brass out of the suite. The resulting film was made up largely of Brass' outtakes, including the zooms that the cameras used to change shots. Not feeling that the resulting film was the one he shot, Brass disowned the film. Guccione's contribution to the film is decidedly a non-creative one, for lack of a better word. He was simply protecting his investment. And so, with both the writer and the director taking their names off the film, Caligula finds itself without an auteur.

While I do feel that this lack of perspective keeps the film from being worth much celebration, I can't say that it prevents it from registering or having impact. The sex and violence is utterly without passion or meaning. It's incomprehensible and genuinely inhuman, and as a result can be read as truly anti-violence and anti-sex. Guccione's main contribution to the film may be the coda that we see at the very beginning: "What shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" -Matthew 16:26. In the documentary included with the DVD, Guccione says that his film isn't pornography, it's paganography! He defends the film by saying that all the sex and violence that we see is the result of an utterly uninhibited pre-Christian society. I wonder what Guccione is thinking. There is a contradiction here: Guccione seems to think that Christianity is prudish, but he quotes from the New Testament to condemn Caligula. There is a Pauline Kael review for every occasion. The one that applies here is of course her fevered pan of Fellini Satyricon, which works well as the definitive criticism of Larry Clark's Kids and Bully (if not quite The Devils and Salo). She sees Satyricon as the fantasies of a Catholic schoolboy imagining a world of debauchery before Christ cleaned up the world. Kael didn't have the patience for such nonsense. She thought Fellini naive or somehow limited for associating sex with spiritual hollowness.

Hardcore pornography doesn't appeal to me, but I wonder about the people that it does appeal to. I haven't seen the studies, but I have to wonder if the people who prefer hardcore to softcore grew up in sexually repressive backgrounds. It seems moralistic to me, that it's sex explicitly sanctioned as filthy. In his harsh pan of Caligula, Roger Ebert complains that there is no joy or pleasure in the sex. That it's all sadistic and angry. Well, of course. Hardcore pornography by its very nature infers that sex is evil. By hardcore pornography, I'm meaning films that show actual penetration and actual ejaculation, where there is little question that people are actually having sex. By softcore, I mean that the sex is simulated or even implied. Softcore is an abstraction of sex, what we are accustomed to regarding as an aestheticization. The documentary (acinematic) aspect to hardcore lends the sex a mechanical ritualistic quality. And it's deglamorized and demystified, all about the juices and the way that all the bits and pieces fit together. The sexual scenes in Caligula, the first hardcore film I have seen through all the way (most aren't meant to be seen all the way through anyway, I understand) send a strong message to my stomach which then exchanges some harsh words with my penis. (There are so many graphic scenes of fellatio in this movie that I swear I've given fried chicken up for good.) Up inside my head though, all of this is really sort of fascinating. I do not buy the idea that hardcore is the final product of a society that has surrendered its prudish inhibitions. I think that softcore better accomplishes this, attempting to work sensuality into the very fabric of the film through the cinematography, editing and acting. In harsh contrast, I see hardcore as rebellious and pushing against existing norms. If it were to be truly legitimized it would lose much of its appeal.

Caligula's scenes of hardcore fucking actually effectively join both Vidal's and Brass' perspectives towards Rome. It's filthy and gritty while being elaborate and theatrical like "The Creation of Adam" painted in fecal matter. The sex could also be argued to support both perspectives toward Caligula himself. Caligula's sexual crimes are certainly without passion and could support Vidal's position that they are the symptom of too much power, too much boredom and not enough wisdom. They could also support that idea of the Marxist hero. Perhaps hardcore isn't just about sanctioning dirty sex; perhaps it's simply a lowbrow attack toward pomposity. The idea of the Roman orgy can be seen as an attack toward the cultural elitism of the higher classes. When push comes to shove, everybody fucks. Both conceptions of Caligula make him out to be either flawed or heroic. They lend him some sympathy. Pretty much everybody who has seen Caligula, however, will probably agree that this is one of the most unsympathetic characters to have ever graced the screen.

Somewhere in the first half in the movie (I think), Caligula sets his eye on a beautiful virgin bequeathed to be married to a good Roman soldier. On their wedding day, Caligula goes into the kitchen to give them a present. He brutally rapes the bride and makes her groom watch. Then while she is crying, her thighs smeared with blood, Caligula bends the groom over, smears lard or unbaked pie crust on him and fists him. For some blissfully inexplicable reason, we are not given a close-up. Caligula then makes sure that the groom understands that he got his big insignia ring up his anus. Malcolm McDowell says that the fisting was a compromise; he was originally asked to just rape him. I can assure you that a simple guy-on-guy rape would have been far easier to watch, but this probably works better in terms of showing Caligula just humiliating the guy. Later he hangs this guy up and orders his soldier to kill him very slowly. Then he has his penis cut off and fed to the dogs. The palace prostitutes then urinate on his corpse giggling. His crime this time? Simply being a good and honest man and thus a bad Roman.

Caligula gleefully sends people off to execution for treason, usually through the use of goofy logic like that. Caligula's loyal general is Macro. Macro freely shares his wife with Caligula and murders Caligula's grandfather Tiberius before Tiberius can kill Caligula. Macro's reward? Caligula pins Tiberius' death on him and has him put to death. This leads to one of the less gruesome but still the most uncomfortable sequences in the picture. Macro is buried up to his neck with several other prisoners and decapitated with a giant moving stage with rotating blades. As Caligula awaits the death, he throws fruit at Macro's head and cheerfully laughs when he gets a hit. In the fisting sequence and the castration, the cruelty at least has some sort of weight to it. Macro's death here is so casual and cold he doesn't even get the intimacy of a good torture.

Watching Caligula do all these things I found myself thinking a whole lot about Michael Alig from Party Monster. Michael Alig would also go on that list of the most repugnant people to have ever had a movie made about them. Alig and Caligula are two peas in a pod: spongy, arrogant, aggressively anti-social and anti-intellectual. The dark side of the children who never grew up, they remind us that to be a kid usually means that you're innately spongy, arrogant, and aggressively anti-social and anti-intellectual. Alig and Caligula are the monsters that only a society of affluence and instantaneous gratification could produce. They weren't spanked enough as children. Or perhaps they simply weren't told "no" enough. If you were to produce an iota of sympathy for either Caligula or Alig, it would be through the perspective that they were not free agents, but products of a careless society. They need love, they need love very badly, but they sure as hell are completely unlovable. You know, I don't think I would recommend either Caligula or Party Monster by themselves, but that would certainly be a very interesting double feature. To borrow Lars Von Trier's comments on his American trilogy, you'll be in for one grim evening and you will not be entertained at all.

Both Macaulay Culkin and Malcolm McDowell should be praised for taking on these characters. Not only are they playing unlikable people, they're playing showy emotionally bankrupt people. I feel though that Culkin's Alig is just slightly more repugnant. Culkin has a sort of relaxed sterility that effectively alienates the audience even more than the usual Peter Pan-from-hell aspects of the characters. Malcolm McDowell is weirder than Culkin. He's handsome, but in a strange, vaguely threatening way. There is a sense in which we can recoil from him much more directly; he's not pushing us away with Good Son prettiness. In the accompanying documentary McDowell describes his character in ways that suggests that he is meant to be human, to be a figure of sympathy.

If there is anybody less sympathetic than Caligula, then it would probably be Grandpa Tiberius, played by Peter O'Toole. Mind you that Caligula is unlikable, but Tiberius is plain inhuman. In his first appearance he goes for a swim with several pubescent boys and girls and ties up a man's urinary tract, force feeds him wine, and bursts open his stomach with his sword. Just for kicks. O'Toole's performance belongs in a short gallery of work that would include Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, Ted Levine in Silence of the Lambs, and possibly even R. Lee Ermey in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You're tempted to look for something underneath all the bile, but you always come up empty. There is just plainly nothing to attach your sympathy to; these people are just aliens. Both O'Toole and McDowell are wonderfully British: theatrical and mannered, willfully artificial and hard-working. Hammy and over-the-top? Brother, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. They don't make this kind of ham every day. O'Toole is allowed to be more over-the-top. His Tiberius is scarred with syphilis and has nasty brown teeth. The make-up creates the necessary barrier for us to really penetrate Tiberius; we can accept him easily as a cartoon. (When Macro suffocates him and we see those wonderfully rotten teeth through the netting, the image gains some sort of hipster nihilistic quality, like "an album cover of a record you would never want to play" and thus becomes about itself.)

Tiberius is easily more evil than Caligula, but we don't hate him as strongly. In the documentary, Gore Vidal makes the insanely silly comment, "There's a little Caligula in all of us," but I wonder if it's that self-recognition that repulses us so much from Caligula. We recognize that he's stuck in a stage that most of us have thankfully long since grown out of, but there remains a certain sense of recurring guilt in simply seeing it played out.

McDowell and O'Toole are both brilliant in this film, and deserve some long overdue credit. McDowell especially. Caligula had very little effect on O'Toole's reputation. He was already a legend by the time that it was made, and for some reason people never really assigned much weight to his presence here. I can't help but to think that Caligula had a role in killing McDowell off though; I mean, before I even saw Caligula, his association with it dirtied him in my eyes. But he's good, and he's very often always good. Caligula is a variation on his pre-established persona: that of the intelligent and naturally sadistic child. As a typecast heavy he's less showboat-y than Dennis Hopper. Resentment and evil is swimming around in his very soul; he doesn't even need to express it. It's there. When he was cast in Star Trek: Generations, the filmmakers were apparently only looking for the sort of class inherent through a British actor. Instead, McDowell brought some weight and some suffering to the film. It got a little darker by virtue of his presence, and was saved from being negligible bullshit. Similarly, I suppose in Caligula Bob Guccione was looking to class his picture up by casting McDowell (as well as Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole). But McDowell's performance doesn't just give it class; he gives it a sickly humanity that's almost as terrifying as all the castrations and decapitations.