"Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered at around midnight on 2 November 1975. His blood-soaked body was found the next morning on waste ground in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome, battered so badly the famous face was almost unrecognisable. Italy's premier intellectual, artist, provocateur, national conscience, homosexual, dead at the age of 53, his scandalous final film still in the editing suite."
"Assassinato Pasolini, the next morning's papers announced, alongside photographs of the 17-year-old accused of his murder. Everyone knew his taste for working-class hustlers. A hookup gone wrong was the instant verdict. Some deaths are so suggestive that they become emblematic of a subject, the deceiving lens through which an entire life is forever after read. In this weirdly totalitarian mode of interpretation, Virginia Woolf is always walking towards the Ouse, the river in which she drowned herself."
"But what if this was the intention; the malevolent cunning with which his assassination was designed? What if, rather than the instant martyrdom of a bullet to the head, Pasolini was killed in such a way as to make it seem that he had sought out his own destruction, a rightful punishment, at least in the eyes of conservatives, for the manifest perversions with which his art as well as life were rife?"
Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered at midnight on 2 November 1975; his battered, blood-soaked body was found on waste ground in Ostia. Newspapers ran 'Assassinato Pasolini' with photographs of a 17-year-old accused, and a hookup gone wrong became the immediate narrative because of Pasolini's known relationships with working-class hustlers. The violent death has shaped interpretations of his life and work, but a credible hypothesis holds that the killing was staged to appear self-destructive, to punish perceived perversions, and to discredit and silence his urgent warnings. Pasolini had publicly warned about the nature of power and corruption in 1970s Italy during the Years of Lead.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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