This is how John David Rhodes begins his essay ‘Watchable bodies: Salò's young non-actors’. The scene he describes is from Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma: 1975). In this essay, Rhodes takes issue with the film's supposed anti-eroticism. Whilst the critical consensus has been that there is nothing erotically appealing in this film, Rhodes points out that the standard reception ends up disavowing something rather striking: namely, the fact that in this film there are a number of beautiful boys. ‘Many of us’, Rhodes says, ‘might find the sheer fact of so much nakedness at the film's beginning – its curatorial selection and display of beautiful and nubile flesh – to be (dare I risk saying this?) somewhat arousing or at least titillating.’ Conceived as an allegorical critique of the fascism of consumer capitalism in post-economic-boom Italy, this is a film that features horrific scenes of physical violence and humiliation. For Rhodes, it is precisely the presence of these scenes that is supposed to ‘neutralise’ the erotic appeal of the beautiful young boys. And yet Rhodes argues that Pasolini ‘has chosen his actors precisely because they are attractive – precisely because their bodies will, at least, raise the risk or summon the spectre of our own arousal’. Rhodes seems to suggest here that the anxiety resulting from the possibility that we might desire these bodies – the same bodies that will be sexually exploited and tortured for the pleasure of their executioners – is something that haunts our viewing experience of the film.