Pasolini always remains detached from his characters. He is not interested in interpreting behaviour. He describes what he sees. His objectivity is alarmingly emotive, particularly when he contrasts a tragedy with the surrounding scenery. (p. 22)

Pasolini's reality is not naturalistic. It is, he says, philosophical and sacral. He tries to enlarge the reality he represents by dubbing his characters, preferably with a different voice, to make them more mysterious, larger than life. (p. 24)

His cinematic style underlines his sense of pastiche, being a combination of several styles, principally Mizoguchi, Chaplin and Dreyer. He sees these directors as 'epic-mythic': they see things from a point of view that is absolute, essential and, in a way, sacral. This is the same way in which Pasolini sees things…. (pp. 24-5)

Christ dies violently on the cross at the end of Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 1964), screaming and accompanied by cut-in shots of tumbling buildings. Like Pasolini's other heroes he is a rebel. His Lenin-like figure, neurotic and fanatic, moves among the peasantry, a passionate revolutionary, threatening and cajoling, a man with a mission who has 'come not to bring peace but a sword'. There is little, or nothing, of the gentle divine in Pasolini's Christ…. He is a homosexual Christ, needing the adoration of his disciples, but isolated and able to give little affection in return. He is a Christ who spurns his mother with the words: 'Who is a mother, who are brethren to me?' but who suffers from his own act of rejection as he strides away in tears. Pasolini's Christ is both Marxist and religious…. (pp. 25-6)

With Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) Pasolini reaches the peak of his autobiographical rebellion. He consciously reconstructs the origins of his Oedipus complex, exploring his relationships with the father he hated and the mother he adored. (p. 28)

[In Oedipus] Pasolini is crudely emphasizing the super-ego represented by the father repressing the child. But if Pasolini's ideas on psycho-analytic theory are naïve, he is here artistically effective and convincing, more so than in the rest of the film. When Pasolini abruptly cuts from the modern father clutching the baby's ankles in a fit of hate to the baby bound by wrists and ankles being carried across a Moroccan desert, the connections seem too tenuous. Pasolini is attempting to move from his own Oedipal situation into a generalized concept of the Oedipus complex, based on the myth of Oedipus. He has said that the basic operation in the film is to reproject psychoanalysis onto the myth. But it doesn't work on this level. (pp. 28-9)

Oedipus Rex is a patchy film, moments of violence and power are spoilt by naïvety and overstatement, and, for Pasolini, parts are surprisingly insensitive. (p. 30)

Throughout his work Pasolini is searching for a way of life that is both Marxist and embraces his feelings about religion. Often the two are confused. He originally intended Marxism as the unifying theme in his work. (p. 32)

[A] search for 'truth' is more plausible as the unity that permeates Pasolini's work. It is a truth that can be summed up in the Socratic 'Know thyself.' (p. 33)