400 Years of Distaff Deception, Depicted in Film

Don't blame me ladies; I am just the messenger.

As I write this, there are two feature-length films scheduled for imminent release.  While they seem entirely unrelated on the surface, a common theme emerges naturally that is plain just from the stories that they tell.

One is Ken Russell's adaptation of the true story recounted in Aldous Huxley's "The Devils of Loudun," the adaptation first released in 1971 but now to be re-released in a restored version that includes scenes that were left out of the original as too provocative and controversial for a general audience.

In 17th century Loudun, France, a handsome and charismatic young priest, Father Grandier, is posted to the town.  His sermons are much loved, but he is in fact a licentious scoundrel.

There is an Ursuline convent in the town, and its abbess, Sister Jeanne, becomes sexually obsessed with the young priest.  She asks him to be her personal confessor with hopes that that relationship will blossom into something more.  When Father Grandier declines, pleading other responsibilities, her romantic attraction quickly turns to bitter resentment and hatred.  Her schemes against him culminate in what we would now probably characterize at the abbey as displays of mass hysteria.  The nuns in her care fall into wild abandon.  They lie on the floor, hike up their skirts and shout out the vilest of obscenities.  These displays become a form of mass entertainment for the townspeople and for others who come to Loudun just to bear witness.

When various Church authorities investigate what is going on, Sister Jeanne convinces them that Father Grandier, in league with Satan, has facilitated demonic possession of the nuns.  The ensuing attempts to exorcise them lead to further blasphemous displays, to the mixed horror and delight of the locals.

All of this takes place against a backdrop of political intrigue that is orchestrated from Paris by none other than the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, who at the time perhaps wielded the most power in France after his patron, King Louis XIII.

The Grandier affair fit nicely into Richelieu's larger scheming, and when the priest was convicted of conspiring with the Devil to ruin the souls of the Ursulines, Richelieu personally authorized and blessed the burning of Grandier at the stake.

Huxley's telling of this tale is remarkably detailed and doubtless historically accurate; because the entire affair was centered on the Church, meticulous records were kept and they have remained intact for four centuries.

In a postscript, Huxley details for us as well the horrifying final days of the Cardinal himself.  Fittingly, perhaps, his last illness and hare-brained attempts to cure it turned him into an object from which everyone involuntarily recoiled in disgust.

The second film is "You Can See Everything," a documentary about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, once America's youngest self-made female billionaire, now serving time in a federal prison for fraud associated with her late company Theranos, which purported to have invented a revolutionary way to do blood tests with mere pin pricks rather than needles.  At her peak she had George Schultz and Henry Kissinger on her board of directors; Barack Obama made her a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, or "PAGE."  Now all of that lies in dust.

The film begins with its co-director, comedian Nathan Fielder, shadowing Elizabeth for a month in her husband's home as she prepares to enter prison, but the film's investigation of her psyche goes on for three years.  The trailer, which is all that we have at the moment, is oddly riveting; something in the unblinking gaze of Elizabeth communicates a deep and dangerous level of mental disturbance.

I don't have the stomach to witness the depravity of "the devils" as portrayed by Russell and, besides, I have already absorbed the whole story from the infinitely more subtle pen of Aldous.  But I will succumb, I think, to Fielder's portrayal of the Holmes saga, even though I suspect that what lies at the core of her particular 21st century epic deception will forever remain opaque.