These Alien Guests
On Teorema
RAMSEY MCGLAZER
Thirty years before There’s Something about Mary (1998), there was something about Terence Stamp’s crotch. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968), Stamp’s bulge magnetized everyone’s attention and activated everyone’s desire. It drove some characters to distraction and caused others to enter catatonic states. It helped some to achieve artistic breakthroughs and prompted others to give up the family business, leave a well-appointed home, and wander off into the desert, naked, aphasic, and alone.
In the film, Stamp plays a mysterious and unnamed guest whose arrival in the villa owned by a Milanese family upends several so-called lives. Mother and father, son and daughter and domestic servant all fall for the guest, who serially beds them, humping his hosts and hostesses. We know from the fallout that the sex is lifechanging, home-wrecking, but we aren’t shown much of this sex directly. Instead, Stamp’s clothed crotch keeps appearing onscreen; his bulge obtrudes repeatedly, reminding us of his phallic potency. Sometimes we can clearly see a telltale shape through thin fabric. At other moments, the guest’s pants are hard like a sheath, preventing us from appreciating what he’s packing. Still, shots of his crotch recur with such frequency that even these more modest trousers hint teasingly at what’s under them. In one scene, we see Stamp undressing and catch a brief glimpse of his cock that both does and doesn’t answer this question. The disclosure doesn’t fully satisfy. It stops short of accounting for what all the fuss and familial obsession is about. The fuss both is and is not occasioned by the organ. It is a response to something in the guest that is more than his member, and Teorema leaves us wondering what this something might be. Although the film’s title suggests that it will offer proof or at least state something provable, this promise turns out to be false. Pasolini’s theorem proves elusive. The film wants to say something about desire and its worldshattering force. But what? Where does the guest, who awakens so many people’s repressed desires, come from, and why does he go? Is he the leaf, the blossom, or the bole? How can we know the dick-print from the pants?
Something of Teorema survives, though only barely, in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023). Barry Keoghan’s character can be seen as a new edition of Stamp’s guest. Keoghan, too, falls in with a rich family. And, like Stamp, he causes serial disturbances, ruining the lives of those he visits, one after another. Viewers are told early on that Keoghan’s cock is remarkable. (“Good for you!,” a mean gay cousin says, before adding, “What a twist,” in case we didn’t get the first comment’s heavy and foreshadowing significance. And since Keoghan’s character’s name is Oliver, we are meant to find this very clever.) Saltburn will go on to deliver what Teorema did not: a finale that answers all questions, making complete retractive sense of Keoghan’s appeal and marking his triumph. He’s naked but not hard (this is Hollywood), but Saltburn’s closing sequence invites us to conclude that his impressive cock is what it has been about all along. This penis coextensive with the phallus has underwritten Keoghan’s ascent and has been the source of his leverage, allowing for his social climbing. It has been the secret to his success, and wielding it has been the most important play in his long game, which is a self-enrichment scheme.
It is instructive, if also depressing, to compare the two films’ endings. The exercise takes us from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it points to a long, collective degradation in our understanding of desire. Teorema ends with an anti-Oedipal conflagration. After the guest’s departure, the father, an industrialist, relinquishes his factory, leaving the workers in charge. (Pasolini suggests that this is something of a poisoned gift.) He is cruised in a train station, eye-fucked by a younger man whose bulging jeans leave no room for doubt. This wordless exchange prompts him to strip, right there in the station, abandoning his clothes as well as his business and his family. An abrupt cut takes him, barefoot, directly from the station into an empty volcanic expanse. He climbs a hill, picks up his pace, falls into the sand, gets up, keeps moving. In the film’s last frames, we see and hear him howling wordlessly.
Could anything be less like this than Keoghan’s final, indoor turn in Saltburn? Oliver has gotten rich quick, though this process has required patience, meticulous planning, and plenty of cunning. He has inherited a mansion, and he dances through it with relish, letting us admire his well-lit, naked, athletic body. (Good for him!). In Teorema, the discovery of desire brings about the destruction of part of the bourgeois world, and a family is dispossessed by a guest who gains nothing, only coming and going. In Saltburn, by contrast, the guest takes over, and the world around him remains intact even without his hosts in it. Indeed, that the hosts are gone means that their home is his to enjoy alone, his cock resplendent, his phallic power affirmed. Maybe someday he’ll start a family, leaving his property to an heir, who will offer up more of the patriarchal same.
Watching Saltburn is enough to make viewers nostalgic for the heady days of Teorema. For all its selfseriousness, at least the earlier film took risks that weren’t calculated to become clickbait. Some might object to that anachronism, but my point is that, for many people, there was more at stake in making films, back then. There was more at stake not just in the experience of art cinema but also in the exploration of desire, in the effort to fathom its depths and to follow where it might lead, even if this was into the desert. Now, Saltburn suggests, if it leads anywhere, desire lands us back where we started: in the home of the nuclear family, the headquarters of the Oedipal struggle to displace and kill one’s predecessor, to inherit his wealth. Here there is no desert; there are only manicured grounds, where His Majesty the Ego reigns. In this parable, there is no exit from the impasse of accumulation; there is only the dream of winning, of securing wealth in a triumph of striving and individual will and oneupmanship, a one-man dicking down.
Whereas Pasolini asks us to envision a process of ego-destruction, then, Fennell stages the fantasy of an ego that is “master in its own house,” after all. At the end of Saltburn, the last man standing stands alone, and his security stands achieved. Sex has been a strategy, a means to this end, and, though he has railed others, he has never let desire derail him. I have suggested that this fantasy is, in the broad, colloquial sense, Oedipal, because it’s about succession, subjugation, and phallic strife, but this does not mean that it is Freudian. On the contrary, it is resolutely anti-Freudian, a retreat from the lessons of psychoanalysis. It seeks to evade the damaging “blows” that Freud said his science dealt to “human narcissism.”
In this version of Freudianism, psychoanalysis unseats the ego and dislodges the conscious mind, with its aspiration to ownership and dream of dominion. As Freud writes in “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis,” his work “humbles” the ego that “feels secure both as to the completeness and trustworthiness of the reports it receives and as to the openness of the channels through which it enforces its commands.” Freud’s theories, like the neuroses they address, bring disquieting news, then: “The ego feels uneasy; it comes up against limits to its power in its own house, the mind. Thoughts emerge suddenly without one’s knowing where they come from, nor can one do anything to drive them away. These alien guests even seem to be more powerful than those which are at the ego’s command.” In Saltburn, as in Teorema, an alien guest overpowers his hosts. But because the unbidden guest in Saltburn is nothing if not a mastermind, in the end Fennell’s film, unlike Pasolini’s, does not unsettle us. It leaves the ego unscathed or even shores it up, dodging and denying Freud’s emasculating insight. Freudian psychoanalysis ruins the fantasy that structures Saltburn, returning us to Teorema’s time and place.
Ψ
In this time and place, “the bourgeois world” went on levelling other forms of life, and the bourgeoisie’s “tendency to force the whole of humanity to be like itself” was on Pasolini’s mind while he was at work on Teorema. At this time, he was also composing a novel with the same title, published just before the film was first screened in Venice, then famously censored. Pasolini insisted that the book was not a novelization; it was a companion piece but a work in its own right and not an afterthought. (He also noted that both the film and the novel derive from an idea for a play.) Stuart Hood’s translation of the novel, as Theorem, initially published in 1992, has just been reissued—alongside Pasolini’s earlier novel Boys Alive, first published as Ragazzi di vita—by New York Review Books, and its reappearance lets readers revisit a moment in the history of aesthetics and militancy that we might not know we’ve been missing.
Those who already admire the onscreen Teorema will appreciate how the novel both fleshes out and complicates many of the film’s conceits, and how it does so without recourse to the familiar techniques of literary realism. For, we read early on, “this, rather than being a story, is what in the sciences is called ‘a report’: so it is full of information; therefore, technically, its shape rather than being that of ‘a message’ is that of ‘a code.’” But the “code,” with its promise of decipherability, is like the “theorem” with its promise of resolvability and rigor. There is no cracking this code, in other words, but there is value in the effort to figure out, for instance, how droning moments of meta-reflection like this one relate to the verse passages that recur throughout Theorem. What are poems, written in the voices of various characters as well as in the narrator’s own, doing in a text that presents itself as a “report”? In what sense, if any, should we understand such lyrical interruptions—“(his nakedness sacrilege, his erection impossible)”—as “information”? How, if at all, can we make sense of the message they bear or the code they contain when they’re heard alongside the other voices that sound in the novel—the voices, say, of Scripture, of Rimbaud, of Tolstoy, and of Manzoni? The commingling of these voices, like the coexistence of the “report” and the lyric sequence in a single novel, attests to Pasolini’s way of working to arrive not at new answers but at new ways to give shape to questions. This effort is worthy of a good analyst. It is also what makes Theorem the novel, even more than Teorema the film, a corrective to if not quite a cure for Saltburn.
The search for questions takes a literal form in two late chapters in Theorem, both of them made up mostly of lists of unanswered questions that compel the reader “to undertake a difficult and perhaps unpleasant operation—that of turning back from the course of the story to its starting-point.” (So it is a story, after all, despite the narrator’s earlier insistence that it was not one.) In both of these chapters, called “investigations,” the questions are posed by journalists who speak in the middlebrow “language used in daily cultural commerce.” This is quite a comedown—literally in the first case, since the previous chapter shows the maid levitating, metamorphosed after her encounter with the guest. “Do you believe in miracles? And who performs them? God? And why? Why not to everyone or through everyone?” The journalist’s questions bring us back down to earth, and they center on the global spread of “pettybourgeois civilization,” “the complete industrialization of the world.”
But here, as in many of his other works, Pasolini is at pains to note that this process is still underway and not yet, in fact, “complete.” Alien guests remain, as do pockets of resistance. “So religion survives today as an authentic fact only in the peasant world, that is to say . . . the Third World?” “This mad saint at the gates of Milan within sight of the first factories—does she not mean this?” It can be hard, reading these questions now, to hear them as earnest. But they speak to the serious struggle that animates the novel as a whole: a struggle to locate the alien guests whose returns could bring down houses and destroy hierarchies. This would entail not only a Freudian “educat[ion] of the ego”—a humbling of bourgeois humanity—but also a Fanonian commitment to interrogation without end.
“The bourgeoisie,” Pasolini writes later in Theorem, in the voice of another journalist, “no longer has anyone outside itself on whom to lay the burden of its own condemnation.” Theorem takes up the burden and delivers the condemnation while also reminding readers of the “outside” that persists, even within sight of the factories. Even “the squalid prose of the here and now” into which the novel descends abruptly—even the degraded language of journalism— is capable of registering this. For the journalist is driven to distraction. His last question is: “CAN [THE BOURGEOISIE] NOT REPLY TO THESE QUESTIONS?” This question anticipates a line in the novel’s verse finale: “I AM FULL OF A QUESTION THAT I CAN’T ANSWER.” If we know nothing else at the end of Theorem, we know that the answers are not going to come from inside the house.
That they might yet come from sex—sex so mind-blowing that it’s miraculous, so back-breaking it’s beyond—is what Terence Stamp’s crotch seemed to promise. In Teorema the film, the shots of this crotch marked a spot where divine power seemed to still reside. In the novel, the guest is still “a revelation,” his beauty “unbearable,” “his loins immaculate and powerful between the two protective columns” of his legs. But the verbal medium scatters our attention, interestingly; the novel is less consistently focused on the guest’s goods, and so it offers us a chance to meditate on what else he brings to the table.
“Freudian psychoanalysis ruins the fantasy that structures Saltburn, returning us to Teorema’s time and place.”
“All the members of the family have been made equal by their secret love, by the fact that they belong to the guest so that there is no difference between them. The glance of each one has the same meaning, the same end, but taken all together they certainly do not form a community of worshippers. (Even if the silence of that dinner of theirs is sacred.)” This is not a last supper, except when it is. This kind of fort/da game recurs throughout the novel, so that the sacred is proffered as a possible “meaning,” an explanation of the events unfolding, only to be abruptly withdrawn. Who, then, do the members of the family belong to when they “belong to the guest”? What does it mean that they’re “made equal” not by longing or by sublimated, spiritual love but by sex, serially enjoyed?
Readers who know Pasolini’s films will recognize his abiding interest in the flesh, as in The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), where it’s impossible to separate the carnal from the divine. But it would be a mistake, reading Pasolini, to locate sex at a far remove from the mundane world of work and money. Sex is not simply salvific. And, if you’re Pasolini, it’s not free. Consider this story, recounted by biographer Enzo Siciliano: Shortly after his move to Rome, where he would both set and write Boys Alive, Pasolini is relieved to find that in the city, unlike in the provinces, “homosexual encounters are easy, lowerclass boys ready and willing. All that was needed was a little money. Pier Paolo wrote to his cousin Nico in Casarsa, and Nico went to Venice and raised some ready cash by selling the Greek and Latin classics in the Teubner editions and the Laterza Italian ones, books painstakingly collected by Pier Paolo over the years.”
Books bankroll sex; a cousin in the country helps to sponsor the urban traffic in rent boys. Pasolini gives up his classics, but he does so as a way of continuing to practice the vizio greco, the “Greek vice.” Rough trade takes the place of lyric as a source of inspiration; epic nights eclipse epic poems. Was every new hustler, for the young Pasolini, an alien guest? Did each, as he came through Pasolini’s revolving door or passed the poet around, hold out the promise of ego-demolition, standing for the possibility of a world-destruction to be welcomed?
If so, then maybe the contemporary Anglophone answer to Theorem isn’t Saltburn (or a more explicit homage like Ali Smith’s The Accidental) but Emma Cline’s The Guest, a novel about an escort who’s in trouble and trying to get by, staying in rich people’s houses. In The Guest, there are no depths of subjectivity left and no sublime transports; sex is transactional. No one is reading the classics anymore here, and there are no tonal shifts or formal risks corresponding to Pasolini’s: no passages in verse, no tonal variations, no miracles, no “investigations.” Those resources have gone the way of landlines, and the prose is as uniformly flat as the characters. But if the world of Cline’s novel is just as vacuous and just as inescapable as the world of Saltburn, at least its depiction in The Guest is more honest. There’s no exit from the claustrophobic social world of Cline’s Long Island, which condemns itself. Like Theorem, though, with its “outside,” The Guest puts us in touch with the desire to be elsewhere. It leaves us wanting something other than more of the same, something more than our own big house.