Benedetta, 2021 film, Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Reviewed by E. Michael Jones

Rachel Handler can’t stop grinning. The senior editor at Vulture/ NY Mag used her credentials as an actress best known for playing Chunks in the 2016 horror movie Smothered1 to cop a press pass to the Cannes Film Festival, where she attended a screening of Paul Verhoeven’s nunsploitation flick Benedetta, and she is absolutely giddy from the film’s sexually titillating message, which is that nuns are all sexually frustrated lesbians, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term:

Nunsploitation is a subgenre of exploitation film which had its peak in Europe in the 1970s. These films typically involve Christian nuns living in convents during the Middle Ages. The main conflict of the story is usually of a religious or sexual nature, such as religious oppression or sexual suppression due to living in celibacy. The Inquisition is another common theme. These films, although often seen as pure exploitation films, often contain criticism against religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Indeed, some protagonist dialogue voiced feminist consciousness and rejection of their subordinated social role. Many of these films were made in countries where the Catholic Church is influential, such as Italy and Spain. One atypical example of the genre, Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi), was set in then present-day Italy (1978).2

France played a crucial role in the development of this genre, which began with the publication of Denis Diderot’s epistolatory novel La Religieuse, which has been adapted several times for the cinema, as The Nun in 1966 and in 2013, as Liebesbriefe einer portugiesischen Nonne in (Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun) 1977, and as the basis for Convent of Sinners in 1986. The plot, which is the same for all of these films, begins when an innocent girl is forced to enter a convent against her will. Once immured behind convent walls, she is subjected to the sexual sadism of the mother superior, who is that way because the Catholic faith in general and life in the convent in particular are “intolerable, dehumanizing and sexually repressive.”3
During the period when Diderot wrote his novel, pornography got weaponized into libels which ridiculed the impotence of the king and the insatiable sexuality of Marie Antoinette, who was portrayed as having sex with soldiers, priests, and various animals. Pornography had turned France into “a cultural battle zone” when unprecedented numbers of revolutionary erotic libels were released into that country’s cultural blood stream between the years 1787 and 1792. “The avalanche of defamation that overwhelmed [Marie Antoinette] between 1789 and her execution on October 16, 1793,” had “no parallel in the history of vilification,” and the pornographic libels which aimed at her vilification were so vast that the real Marie Antoinette was replaced by a “ribald fiction,” whose dehumanization contributed to her death.4 Eventually, life began to imitate art, as pornographic tropes ended up in the bill of indictment at her trial, and Marie Antoinette ended up on the scaffold.
The Cannes Film Festival, which hosted the showing of Verhoeven’s film, became an extension of revolutionary cultural politics when it came into existence in 1939 as an alternative to the older Venice film festival, after that venue fell under the influence of Mussolini’s fascism. The French were outraged when the Italians snubbed Jean Renoir’s pacifist film The Grand Illusion. Hollywood capitalized on French anger when Louis Mayer, head of MGM studios, colonized the new festival by sending an ocean liner of Hollywood stars to the Mediterranean resort in August of 1939. Five years before the D-Day Invasion, Hollywood’s A-Team of Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Mae West, Norma Shearer, Paul Muni, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, and George Raft stormed ashore in the south of France and turned Cannes into the Jewish beachhead it has been ever since,5 and it has served as a vehicle for blasphemy and perverted sexuality ever since, giving its 1961 Palme d’Or to Luis Bunuel’s blasphemous film Viridiana. For those unfamiliar with Bunuel’s entry to the list of the top ten blasphemous films of all time, Viridiana involves a nun “engaging in an implied menage a trois with her cousin and the cousin’s lover.”6 The film won the Palme d’Or in spite of (or, most probably, because of) being banned in Spain and being condemned as blasphemous by L’Os servatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican.7 In 2013, the Cannes jury under the guidance of Steven Spielberg, director of the Holocaust porn film Schindler’s List, conferred the Palme d’Or on Blue is the Warmest Color, a three hour long exploration of lesbian sex, which oddly enough doesn’t involve any nuns.
Handler can hardly contain herself “after grinning my way through two hours of the movie’s absolutely demented lesbian nunsploitation chaos,” but doesn’t want to tell us too much because that might ruin “the transcendent future experience of watching it in a theater with a bunch of furious Catholics picketing outside.” Then as if to let us know what really turns her on, Handler shares just one of many cinematic gems which can be divulged without spoiling our delight in the rest of the movie:

After Benedetta complains that Bartolomea wasn’t hitting it deep enough, Bartolomea presents Benedetta with a gift: a Virgin Mary statue rescued from her childhood, given to her by her mother, which she has carved into the shape of a dildo with the head of the Virgin Mary. She f**ks her with it, and everyone involved is thrilled, including Verhoeven, who takes clear delight in shooting the little Virgin Mary head going in and out.8

What started off in France as the pornographic libels against the Catholic Church which led to the French Revolution has lost its impact now that homosexuality has lost its odium among the film-going public. But this film isn’t really about lesbianism. It’s about blasphemy, sacrilege, and calumny. Handler then tells us that Benedetta is “deranged on nearly every single level,” making it “a blasphemous, maximalist, hilariously erotic satire,” which is her way of saying that she really enjoys watching this sort of stuff. Handler is grinning because she delights in blasphemy, and she delights in blasphemy because, as she puts it in her review, “I am Jewish.”9 Paul Verhoeven isn’t Jewish, but he’s Dutch, which has been pretty much the same thing since the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and chachems like Menassah ben Israel arrived in Amsterdam shortly thereafter.
The distinction doesn’t really matter anymore because modernity is Jewish, as Yuri Slezkine pointed out in his book The Jewish Century, and everyone now thinks like a Jew. Even those who contest the Jewish hegemony over their minds now speak at the sufferance of the Jews. Because the ADL has total control of the Internet, virtually every statement that get published there is either an endorsement of Jewish virtues like blasphemy, sacrilege, sodomy, abortion, transgenderism, etc., or a condemnation of anyone who questions those values as an anti-Semite. This is a fortiori true of industries which Jews control like the film industry and festivals—like the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Awards ceremony, etc.—which reward those working in those industries who are especially adept or transgressive in celebrating Jewish virtues.

St. Simon of Trent

The Torah condemns blasphemy, but the Jewish penchant for celebrating anti-Christian blasphemy finds its theological justification in the Talmud, which includes portrayals of Jesus Christ in hell submerged up to his neck in burning excrement and descriptions of the Blessed Virgin as a whore. These facts were routinely denied by rabbis, who were the sole custodians of Talmudic lore until Peter Schaefer, chairman of the Judaic studies program at Princeton University, wrote his book Jesus and the Talmud. Schaefer’s book was so truthful about its subject that Princeton University Press had to warn its readers that Jesus in the Talmud was “being picked up by anti-Semitic websites as proof that Judaism harbors blasphemous beliefs about Jesus.” Without denying the truth of that claim, the press goes on to say that “it is an important book by a meticulous scholar, the head of Princeton’s Judaic studies program. It is also a truthful book and should be received in a spirit of truthfulness.”10 In other words, Schaefer’s book does prove “that Judaism harbors blasphemous beliefs about Jesus.”
Sacrilege was blasphemy’s constant companion throughout Jewish history. In 2007 Ariel Toaff, son of the chief rabbi of Rome, published Pasque di Sangue, a book which documented the central role which ritual sacrifice of Christian children played in the Jewish religion in the Middle Ages in Europe: In an interview with Haaretz Toaff said: “Over many dozens of pages I proved the centrality of blood on Passover. . . . Based on many sermons, I concluded that blood was used, especially by Ashkenazi Jews, and that there was a belief in the special curative powers of children’s blood. It turns out that among the remedies of Ashkenazi Jews were powders made of blood.” The article also states that: “Although the use of blood is prohibited by Jewish law, Toaff says he found proof of permission given by a highly restricted school of Ashkenazi rabbis to use blood, even human blood. ‘The rabbis permitted it both because the blood was already dried, and because in Ashkenazi communities it was an accepted custom that took on the force of law.’”11
Toaff’s book resurrected the case of St. Simon of Trent, a two-year old child from that northern Italian town who was kidnapped by a few Ashkenazi Jews from his home on the eve of Passover 1475 AD. At night, the kidnappers murdered the child; drew his blood, pierced Benedetta, a blasphemous nunsploitation film November 2021 / 35 his flesh with needles, crucified him head down crying out “So may all Christians by land and sea perish,” and thus they celebrated their Passover, an archaic ritual of outpouring blood and killed babies, in the most literal form, without the usual metaphoric “bloodwine” shift. The killers were apprehended, confessed, and….

[…] This is just an excerpt from the November 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)