I Watched Caligula (Yes, All of it)

I’m going to start this off by admitting I consume a fair bit of fucked-up media. Not because I’m a disgusting monster (let’s hope), but because I’ll read about how harrowing something is to witness and my brain will go “it can’t be that bad, I bet I can handle it.” It’s like I’m trying to earn a Girl Scout badge for having sat through all of Salo or whatever. So when I went down a 2am wiki hole and read about Caligula’s bizarre and troubled production history- and how it was one of only two films Roger Ebert ever walked out of– I immediately went “this is something I absolutely must subject myself to.”

Based on my (weak) research, Bob Guccione, founder of the soft-porn magazine Penthouse, went in with the intent of making a high-budget feature porn-with-plot movie. He hired Tinto Brass to direct. Then they gave Gore Vidal 20k to write the script, and when he finished they were like “this is too gay we have to redo it.” Then basically post-production Guccione filmed a bunch of hardcore porn scenes and spliced them throughout the film to spice things up, pissing off Tinto Brass in the process (you can very easily tell which these scenes are). Brass ended up disavowing the production. The thing is almost 3 hours long and there’s almost no plot. Just young Malcolm McDowell prancing around, being unhinged, framed by naked extras in almost every scene.

Caligula follows Caligula, obviously, from his ascent to Roman imperium to his assassination after just 4 years of rule. And going mad with power. And committing sex crimes. And killing everyone for treason. Also he has an incestuous relationship with his sister, Drusilla (played by Teresa Ann Savoy). The movie is disjointed as hell and fumbles any exploration of themes or character development- usually punctuating attempted plot points with weird, explicit sex or cartoonish shock-value violence (sometimes both! At the same time!). The story feels like it doesn’t matter and is replaced by a feverish procession of unsettling, and sometimes hilarious moments. Take a choice selection from my notes:

• man w/a boner on stilts????
• Men jacking off into a bowl????!
• prolonged pussy-eating scene with ominous music
• I’m like “this isn’t so bad” and then there’s a shot of a woman peeing
• is that a map of modern Europe on the wall Holy Shit

Honestly, by the two hour mark I began to feel a sense of relief and serenity when there weren’t any genitals on screen. And when anything actually happened I could hardly contain myself.

I find myself wondering if they stuck to Vidal’s original script we would’ve gotten a coherent film. There’s bits and pieces here and there lifted directly from Roman historians. Tiberius being a lecherous creep and calling the boys in his pool his “little fishes” comes to mind. There’s also the quote “Let them hate me so long as they fear me,” which rung a bell in my Classics degree head, so I’m assuming its from Suetonius or something. Some thematic threads also underline the film, which, while handled poorly are most certainly interesting and there. A black bird flies into Caligula’s room several times, signalling a portent, though it’s never focused on or talked about by the characters. There’s also Caligula’s obsession with the cult of Isis and Egypt, which is never explored apart from his assertion that if he and Drusilla moved there they could marry each other. I imagine in Gore Vidal’s version all of these threads coalescing into a thematic, dramatic story about an unhinged man’s descent into further madness. I could be totally pulling some mental escapism though to excuse whatever the hell happened that let this damn movie see the light of day.

I have to reach for anything positive to say about Caligula, or the experience of sitting through 2 hours and 36 minutes of weird-porn hell. If anything, the sets and costumes are incredibly elaborate (if wildly historically inaccurate). All of the detail, color, and makeup was consistently giving me Fellini’s Satyricon vibes. But then I found myself wishing I could watch Satyricon instead and that made me depressed. When in prison Caligula makes friends with a barbarian dude, who rules. You never have to see his dick and he never says anything, which is a win as far as this movie goes.

Anyway, I never want to see this film again. The morning after finishing it I was feeling unsettled like I had just watched a Kubrick movie- but no, I was just shell-shocked from how bad Bob Guccione’s attempt at an erotic historical drama was. I had to watch a Taika Waititi movie to cleanse my palate and return me to a stable mental state. Tune in next week when I’m fully recovered and (probably) reviewing a favorite manga of the late 2000’s.