🟧 The Pope-aissance
Papal storytelling is everywhere as we crave grandeur and mystery.
Nate Gallant: For some reason, we seem to be in the midst of a Papal mania. There’s an outpouring of Pope content so specific, so unignorable that I’ve begun thinking of it as something of a Pope-aissance. Much of this media is not a created in a key of reverence, newfound mysticism, or as a record of broader revivals in faith, but something different and not yet entirely clear to me. In this vein, I have asked a few writers to help me break it down.
Senza un perché
David Martin: Verum esse ipsum factum — Truth itself is something made. Giambattista Vico's aphorism. A Janus-face inscribed on a temporal threshold. Both a fitting epitaph for our waning democratic age and an equally apposite epigraph for the theocratic one sure to ensue. Is it any surprise that now, in our present, a benighted interregnum, a figure elected to divine infallibility should occupy so much of cultural output and attention?
We are living in the golden age of Pope Poetics. Conclave. The Two Popes. Not to mention the New and the Young. An undeniable fascination with Vatican politics and aesthetics. And no director has dedicated himself more to the task of producing pontifical panorama than the papal laureate himself, Italian director Paolo Sorrentino.
Sorrentino’s first series for American television after decades in film, The Young Pope (2016), is perhaps his most panoramic. We oscillate between the individual man, his dreams and flaws and obstinacy and the ephemeral delicacy of faith. Universal becoming, itself. We watch Lenny Belardo's transformation into Pius XIII, the journey from an American orphanage to St. Peter's Basilica. Sorrentino creates less a study in an office or character than a hagiography of a devotee to mystery. Both an exploitative mission in Africa and a pederast priest in New York are subject to a form of papal justice, a rare focal point amongst other pope media. Sorrentino's popes are the apotheosis of the Pope. They are Marvel Popes, but in better costumes. They are what I wish Marvel were. They retain the ability to critique.
In a memorable scene from The Young Pope, the prime minister of Greenland dances to a song by Italian pop singer Nada after her papal audience. The record spins infinitely itself on the player echoing the lyrics. Gira infinita senza un perché. (“[Life] spins endlessly without a reason.”) Vico's ages spin relentlessly on. There will be more popes before there are less popes. I doubt anyone will surpass Sorrentino's popes’ ability to fashion truth. It is ultimately their why, their perché, by which we will cross the threshold. What exactly that is, well, who can say? One would have to make their way through a very small door or melt all the ice in Greenland to know for sure.
David Martin is a writer and translator from New Hampshire. He teaches Composition at New England College. He is also a butterfly dreaming that he is a man.
Papal Fashions
Eliza Brooke: If we’re talking about the allure of the papacy in popular culture, we certainly have to talk about fashion. In the same way that the Vatican is built to inspire awe and wonder, Catholic vestments can be rather high-impact — if not borderline fabulous. As the Hot Priest told Fleabag, showing off a gold-trimmed plum number he bought in Rome: “Sometimes I worry I’m only in it for the outfits.”
Clothes are a funny bridge between the Catholic church and the secular world. I’m not talking about a bridge of mutual understanding or respect, necessarily. It’s more that there’s shared DNA between fashion-fashion and Catholic fashion. There’s a reason why Reynolds Woodcock, Phantom Thread’s fictional and fastidious fashion designer, wears raspberry-hued socks from Gammarelli, the Roman shop that dresses the Pope. Game recognizes game.
My former Vox colleague Tara Isabella Burton wrote of artworks that hew to a distinctly Catholic aesthetic, “They’re all highly stylized and elaborate, characterized by grandeur, pomp, and pageantry. They’re often deeply sensual, even erotic. And they’re often extreme or paradoxical, focusing on collapsing binaries of sacred and profane, good and evil.” Grandeur and pageantry? The meeting of the sacred and the profane? That’s fashion at its best, baby. It’s drag. To quote that one viral Letterboxd review of Conclave: “divas in long dresses gossiping with each other trying to snatch a win… this is basically rupaul’s drag race.”
The union of fashion and Catholicism reached its peak at the 2018 Met Gala, which celebrated the exhibit “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” Looking back through photos of the red carpet, I was surprised at how many celebrities avoided obvious references to Catholic iconography or vestments. If they were worried about getting cancelled for sacrilege, they shouldn’t have been. The best look of the night — the image burned in everyone’s mind — pushed the theme to its most literal extreme. I’m speaking, of course, about Rihanna in a baroque beaded minidress and matching robe, designed by John Galliano for Maison Margiela, with a dazzling mitre on her head.
Depending on a person’s personal relationship to Catholicism, seizing on its aesthetic codes might be an act of self-examination or rebellion, naughtiness or fascination. But if you care about fashion, it’s hard not to pay attention. When I watched The First Omen, Arkasha Stevenson’s Omen prequel about a novice impregnated with the antichrist, I couldn’t get over the tailoring of the protagonist’s pinched black skirt suit, which looked like something Thom Browne would cook up. My first thought was, “Where can I get that?” My second was: “Am I going to hell?”
Eliza Brooke is a freelance journalist and the author of The Scumbler, a newsletter about culture and creativity.
Beautiful Mysteries
Kyle Chayka: Is our era not confusing, and ever more so? Granted every time is probably an interesting time, but the sheer unknowability, the proliferating polycrisis, inspires in one the desire for some kind of basic footing. We can’t trust neoliberalism. We can’t trust democracy. We can’t trust wellness trends — green juice and Pilates give us nothing to believe in besides being hot. Can we trust the Pope? Perhaps we can always trust in there being a Pope, the one father figure who might disappoint us but will never disappear. What’s more, the Pope is premised on unknowability. The one, fallible, living man closest to the divine.
Of course the Pope sometimes dies, which is how the film Conclave kicks off. The Pope is gone and thus he must be replaced so that the mystery can continue. His colleagues / underlings scheme on the best way to game the election to pick his replacement. Some enthusiastically want it, others secretly want it. Some don’t know they want it, but they still do. The mystery of the film is who wins — but it remains something of a mystery. Religion is a mystery in a semantic sense, one that we never solve. And Conclave became a hit, I think, in part by indulging that appetite for unknowability.
Is Conclave indicative of a trad pivot for more of culture? More stories of religion, more unknowable figures and inexplicable motives. In its storytelling, the film was familiar. But aesthetically it indulged in more abstraction, with stark cinematography and an emphasis on sharp geometries and contrasting colors. It represents the meeting of the classical and the modernist, in a way that The Brutalist shared in as well. The desire for a genius, the desire for a perfect Pope — we don’t want answers so much as reassurances that continuing to question, that the mystery going unsolved and our era remaining directionless and chaotic, is okay — because it’s likely going to stay that way.
Kyle Chayka is the co-founder of One Thing.
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Loved this multi-writer approach to the topic!