>...the three main motives of the film. The first is the central

File: Teorema.jpg (830KB, 1184x1225px) Image search: [Google]

830KB, 1184x1225px

>...the three main motives of the film. The first is the central character, whose biblical references are obvious. A telegram announces the "good news" about the visit of a young man to a grand bourgeois family. We will not learn anything more about the young man. After he arrives every member of the family, male and female, unable to resist their wild sexual attraction, falls in love with him. After having sex with all the members of the family, making them happy, he suddenly receives word that he must leave. His disappearance leaves the family in total despair.

>The biblical allusion in this has been so obvious that even the overtly corporal interpretation of the divine visitation as well as its sexual character, which is the second important symbolic element, was not problematic even for the Roman Catholic Church. On the contrary, apparently, Pasolini himself asked a Catholic priest, Father Lucio Settimio Caruso of the Pro Civitate Christiana, to find him a biblical citation to illustrate his "teorema" about the "sudden embodiment or eruption of God in earthly affairs." Here is what the priest found for Pasolini: "You have seduced me, my Lord, and I have let myself being seduced" (Jeremiah 20:7). From the film it is clear that Pasolini felt confirmed in the erotic interpretation of the divine contact. The third symbolic motive is the recurring image of the desert, which slightly shifts its meaning each time it appears. The image of the desert is metaphorically associated with other motives of the film, such as the factory, the father, and the sexual adventures of the mother after the visitor disappears. In the last scene the father walks naked in the desert uttering a desperate cry. Other than symbolizing the total desolation of the father's life, the image of the desert becomes saturated here with another biblical allusion. It is Moses' wondering in the desert, in a no-man's-land between the vale of tears and Canaan.

Holy shit, why didn't I notice this before?