Moral and Ethical Ambiguity Salo resists easy moralizing. While its political critique is clear—an attack on authoritarianism, capitalist commodification, and the banality of evil—the film’s graphic depictions problematize the spectator’s position. Are we witnessing a denunciation or a perverse spectacle? Pasolini seems to answer both: he wants viewers to feel implicated and horrified, to experience the discomfort of being drawn to images they must reject. The film forces an ethical interrogation of visual pleasure, spectatorship, and the role of art in representing suffering.