Paul Schrader’s Experiment in Italian Neo-decadence: The Comfort of Strangers and the Sadean System

The Comfort of Strangers (GB/Italy1990), directed by Paul Schrader and written by Harold Pinter (from the short novel by Ian McEwan), who had supplied the 1960s with its premier parable on power and sexuality in The Servant, was no success with audiences or critics, the latter nearly completely missing the obvious redux on a sexualized and cannibalistic fascism that arrived in the 1970s with Visconti, Cavani, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, and Pasolini. This chapter argues that like The Damned (1969) and Death in Venice (1971), as well as their heirs from Fassbinder's German Woman trilogy to Szabo's Mephisto (1981), Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers locates a sociopolitical tension between high and low art.