But these two stories are not very far from each other. The book “Story of the Eye”, however, mentions the gouging of eyes and using them for sexual pleasure.
After watching the movie I believe the poster’s symbolism of the blood dripping from the eyes being Caligula’s evil and deadly vision of Rome. First I noticed looking at the movie’s poster of a coin with Caligula’s face with blood coming from his eyes, I automatically paired that up with the eyes being a symbol in Bataille’s book. This scene shows how powerful and evil he really is.Ĭaligula’s adventurous sex and murder acts reminds me to Georges Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”. In the video, though with no sound, Caligula comments, “If only Rome had but one neck.”. Caligula is shown to be throwing food at the prisoners. The people being executed stick their heads through a hole on the ground and get beheaded by the moving blades. It is a moving wall with spinning blades on the bottom. In his palace there is a machine called the Wall of Death. Caligula demands the husband as well to get on the kitchen table on his fours and rapes him while the woman cries in a puddle of blood from her vagina.Īnother scene in this film showed Caligula’s pleasure for murder. The wife was a virgin which made Caligula enjoy the rape even more as he uses his fingers to wipe the blood from the woman’s inner thighs and smiles with pride and pleasure. He forces the newlywed couple into the palace’s kitchen and forces the bride to get naked on the kitchen table on all fours while Caligula rapes her in front of her husband. One significant scene in this movie involves Caligula crashing a wedding of his most beloved soldier. The movie ends by three senators of the Roman senate leading the assassination of Caligula, his wife and newborn daughter on the steps of the palace, leaving their bodies in front of the palace for the citizens to mock. There are oral sex acts performed in hallways throughout the castle and orgies formed on command by the emperor.
The people of the palace are free to walk around and work while naked. The film depicts this as a norm for this empire. Throughout the film there are scenes that involve Caligula having sex with his sister and younger step brother, orgies, and homosexual sex. After Tiberius’s death Caligula becomes enraged with power and starts adapting his grandfather’s twisted ways. Caligula observes his grandfather’s sadism with fascination and horror. Tiberius enjoys swimming with naked youths and watching degrading sex shows that often include children and deformed people. The movie tells the tale of Caligula’s grandfather, Emperor Tiberius, a mad man who suffers incurable venereal diseases. This film, which is still banned from Canada and Iceland, shocked the world with its explicit portrayal of the emperor’s cruel and salacious escapades.This film is filled with nudity, sex, kink, incest, drag, bestiality, prostitution and murder. Caligula (1979) is a biographical film about the rise and fall of the Roman Emperor Caligula.