The pear of anguish is a medieval torture instrument, whose spoon-like metal segments spread at the turn of a screw in its centre. Also known as the “choke pear” because it was often applied to the victim’s mouth, it could be inserted into any orifice. Strapped to the torture rack, young nun Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) gets a presentation of the pear by the papal nuncio (Lambert Wilson, luxuriating in an air of well-meaning condescension): “Joan of Arc was a brave warrior, as even her enemies had to admit. Nevertheless, she confessed her sins when shown the instruments of torture. Don’t pretend to be braver than Joan of Arc.” The torturer takes over, one-upping the nuncio’s hypocritical solemnity by dutifully declaring (before he inserts the pear offscreen into the screaming nun’s vagina) “We don’t know each other yet, you and me, but we’re in the same boat. The journey can be long. It can be short. Let’s pray that God will illuminate our path.”
This brief highlight—one of many—in Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta is emblematic of the insolent tendencies that have made the Dutch director one of the most distinctive artistic voices working in commercial cinema for the last 50 years. The set-up is familiar from countless movies, and so is the indictment of a systemic double standard that advocates inhuman torture in the name of morality. Usually, filmmakers side with the victim, decry the sadism of the perpetrators, and score easy points by inviting an outrage that is well-justified, but hardly illuminating; or, they go the whole exploitative distance in the other direction and subscribe to what, in an only slightly different context, has come to be called torture porn. But Verhoeven has the cheek to let his torturer spout this insultingly egalitarian statement, making the scene much more outrageous and complex in characteristic ways.
Verhoeven’s great theme is how people create forms of domination to assert power over other people, and the torturer’s sentence is a supremely Verhoevian example of the twisted logic that must be applied so that one can live comfortably within this system, even calling it civilization: per the classic quote from Jean Renoir’s (1939), everyone has his reasons. But while this maxim is usually interpreted within a sympathetic, “humanist” framework, the Verhoeven touch conjures a more ambivalent view of human nature. Stressing the violent and often appalling ways (1997), which doubles as an anthology of the propagandistic image arsenal that the seventh art built up during the 20th century—especially its fascist and totalitarian tendencies—and a hilarious pop-art send-up of same. (That such satire was not always noticed upon release only reinforced the point.)
