About 'The Young Pope' and other things according to stories. That is what the title of this post is, and that is what it is about.
I had finally finished watching The Young Pope up to the tenth, and final episode of the first season today, and have to admit it is well done. The series is decidedly Italian, as ought be expected with director Paolo Sorrentino's main works being in the Italian film and television scene. Many of his movies deal in Italian drama. Alongside that is the common subject material regarding Generation X and the earlier generation of parents from the 1950's and 1960's that are the main characters. Both Sorrentino's English films, This Must Be the Place (2011) and Youth (2015) center around protagonists between the ages of 50 and 70, and are either retired, or of retirement age.
Sean Penn in This Must Be The Place plays Cheyenne, a wealthy former rock star that retired after two of his fans committed suicide. He travels to New York to try and reconcile with his estranged father, who he quit communicating with after his father rejected him for his goth lifestyle. Unfortunately, his father died. Learning from his father's diary about persecution in Auschwitz by a former SS officer, Cheyenne seeks to avenge his father. Apparently, after getting the justice he felt was deserved for the blind, old SS officer, Cheyenne is able to overcome his phobia of flying on airplanes, cuts his hair, and gives up his old goth rock star lifestyle for good.
In Youth Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) are septuagenarians on vacation in the Swiss Alps. Fred is a retired classical composer, and Mick is a filmmaker still working to make his latest film that he calls his "testament". Fred's daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) and Mick's son, were married to each other, though Mick's son leaves Lena for pop star Paloma Faith.
When considering these two films, along with other films and shows that Sorrentino has done, it should be no surprise that The Young Pope centers on the cross generation between essentially those that came of age in the 1950's and 60's and their children that were born in the 1970's. Being born in 1970 himself decidedly makes Sorrentino of Generation X, and helps provide some background on why these themes might be important.
But, of course, there's another aspect of the show, which The Hollywood Reporter seems to have caught on about this idea of a "bait and switch". Apparently, social media started the buzz that there were parallels between Trump becoming president, and the rise of Jude Law's character Lenny Belardo to become the supposed successor of Pope Francis, taking the name of Pope Pius XIII. Sorrentino's answer to that question is interesting, and shows the difference of understanding, not only of what it means to be conservative, but what roles both the Papacy and President of the United States mean to other people in other parts of the world. What he is basically speaking of is the pendulum shift in politics. People in the US seem to forget that this happens, but it did happen last in 2008, when Obama took over office after George W. Bush's presidency. Eight years prior to that W. Bush taking over after Bill Clinton, and still further back Clinton taking over after the twelve year conservative cycle of the Reagan/Bush Sr. era. But, for Lenny/Pope Pius XIII, he is more than just a young conservative Pope. He is in some ways a statement of Generation X, which often seems forgotten and lost in the world. It is, in a sense, a coming of age story for Generation X, that apparently is starting to finally grow up, despite that the older end of this generation is nearing its fifties and looking for ways to retire earlier than the previous generation that continues to try and maintain control until the bitter end. But, what Generation X does notice is that the generations before it that legalized abortion, and thus made it possible to massacre hundreds of millions of infants in the Silent Holocaust of abortion, are dying out. But are they dying out fast enough to prevent the poisoning of the well that is trying to make the current generations not only accept abortion as a fact of life, but even commercialize it in the corporate evangelizing American tradition that always wants to rebel and stir up a revolution? James Cromwell's Character, Cardinal Spencer holds to the spirit of this rebellion that is close to Cromwell's heart and world view. However, Cardinal Spencer dies in season one of the show, and the Cromwell's of this world are dying as well. But, again, they are not going out without a fight.
This notion of the late age of Sorrentino's main actors seem to have been noticed before. Scott Tobias brought it up first in his Vulture piece "A Beginner’s Guide to The Young Pope’s Italian Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino" on January 23, 2017, and only two days later re-published it on Slate. In either link to Tobias' article, you will find his criticism about the age Sorrentino tends to choose for his characters as follows:
"In fact, youth is the one thing separating Pius from the other men in Sorrentino’s filmography. Where Lenny Belardo is just coming into his own as the fearsome conduit between one billion Catholics and the divine, Sorrentino prefers antiheroes on the wrong side of middle age, consumed with regret about their past."
However, I would disagree with Tobias's last line in the article, where he says, "To him [Sorrentino], nothing is sacred." Sure, Sorrentino may be irreverent, but I think he comes to it more with a matter of the sublime, or as Sorrentino himself states to The Hollywood Reporter:
"In the final analysis, it talks about that unsettling little noise of solitude, of loneliness that's inside all of us and that never balances. Which is not the solitude of somebody who doesn't have anybody to chat with in the evening, but it is a more profound, deeper condition and sense of uneasiness [that] in the final analysis you are alone. And that's why those who have that knowledge of this solitude ask themselves the question of God."
In that statement, he sounds more like Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and not just in the use of the phrase "in the final analysis." Much like many artists, even when they may deal with the topic of religion and spirituality in an irreverent manner, they sometimes find themselves speaking on an absolute, universal truth, regardless if they meant to or not, whether it was a conscious decision, or subconscious sort of element. In either case, the element still manages to come out. Maybe Paolo Sorrentino too will have his St. Augustine moment, who himself said in his great work of the Confessions, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in You." This is what true religion gets to the heart of, that in our hearts God is calling.
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