When Paolo Met Flannery

What can the black sheep of Southern Gothic literature tell us about the irreverent Italian director?

This is a deep dive with lots of spoilers. If you’re into that I recommend grabbing some coffee and reading on desktop.

In a recent newsletter, I mentioned in passing Flannery O’Connor’s views on art’s moral dimension:

The writer...sees his obligation as being to the truth of what can happen in life, and not to the reader—not to the reader’s taste, not to the reader’s happiness, not even to the reader’s morals.

The truth of what can happen in life. What a wonderfully capacious phrase. Just what can happen in life, anyway?

The catch is that in answering that question, in sketching the bounds of what constitutes reality, the artist betrays her position, declares her loyalties. There can be no such thing as a fully agnostic or ironic fiction—to function, to exist at all, art must make a commitment. Even if implicit. Even if only amounting to the faith that the workings of the world can be meaningfully observed and described. This is why a pose of nihilism may initially titillate but gets tiresome quickly—it’s not transgressive, it’s just fake and not self-aware enough to realize it.

It is natural to feel the urge to incorporate one’s faith, particularly but not necessarily religious faith, explicitly in one’s work, if only out of a sense of personal integrity. I’ve felt this, too, as my own has re-emerged in many strange and unforeseeable ways. But there is also a counter-urge, an inner siren, which in my head takes on the timbre of Flannery’s drawl: a stern warning to avoid adding to what she called “that large body of pious trash.” Corruptio optimi pessima, the saying goes: the corruption of the best is the worst. Writing about faith, or portraying it in film or fiction, or entering the realm of sacred and liturgical art: the stakes are higher here, and the standards accordingly higher.

Flannery was reacting against a genre of religious art that some of us know well: gauzy, pastel, utterly inoffensive. But blandness is not a simple defect in taste. She saw the real danger in bad art. It’s anaesthetizing, it’s not true to reality, to what can happen in life. No, religious art must be, before anything else, good art: beautiful, yes, but also often shocking and strange. It must be Kafka’s “axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

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It must be offensive, it must offend whatever in us is complacent, cynical, self-satisfied, knowing. 

Here is where a commitment must be made. Flannery, as a Catholic, made hers. Christian anthropology, like any other, carries with it a certain view of what can happen in life. In this case, it sees humans, and the world, created good (very good). It sees us as nevertheless fallen, and thus inclined toward correspondingly great evils (there’s that corruptio optimi pessima again). But it sees us as constantly struggling toward renewed communion with each other and with our Creator. And it sees us being met in this effort by grace, which is the hand of God extended eternally back toward us—sometimes, whether we like it or not; certainly whether we understand it or not. Created good, fallen, redeemed: this is what theologian Alexander Schmemann called the “triune intuition,” the three-part movement that repeats everywhere, because it is baked into the structure of everything. A recognition of this archetype saves us from two great errors: hubris (that we are good but not fallen) and despair (that we are evil and unredeemable). 

“Hey, this sounds kind of like ‘engineering of the soul’!” I can hear some of you intelligently noticing. And it’s true, Flannery wouldn’t take quite as libertine a view of art as the Formalists. To succeed, it must correspond not just to itself, but to an objective reality. But what separates her from the Soviet propagandists is the faith that the system doesn’t need to be gamed, as it were. Artists must be free to use their own eyes, for good or ill. Her confidence is that, to the extent an artist is seeing reality, they will uncover, in some form, its triune nature.   

Okay. What does that have to do with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino?

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Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.
—Flannery O’Connor, The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South

Sorrentino’s been one of my favorites since 2013, when I wandered into a screening of The Great Beauty, a meandering portrait of an aging writer wracked with regrets but confronted with the disruptive possibilities of new life. Il Divo, a portrait of Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti and the web of corruption and high society that surrounds him, is also an excellent entry point. 

Stylistically, he has developed an immediately recognizable filmic idiom: a lyrical, ironic admixture of old and new, transcendence and absurdity, exemplified by dance music thumping through baroque sanctuaries. It manages in a unique way to get at what it’s like to live in our times, caught between nostalgia for the future and the half-comforting, half-irritating persistence of the past. He takes both past and present seriously while exulting in their confusion. 

But what interests me here is his fascination with religious themes, given that he is a secular director working in one of the most securalized industries. Above all, there is his two-season HBO series on the sudden and disruptive rise of a young, radical American pope, Jude Law’s Lenny Belardo. 

In the first season, The Young Pope, Belardo becomes Pope Pius XIII, a one-man wrecking ball in the sclerotic Vatican. In the second season, The New Pope, Pius XIII is in a coma, leading to the rise of a diffident, reluctant British scholar, John Malkovich’s Sir John Brannox, as Pope John Paul III. Both men must navigate the multiplying crises of the Church—financial corruption, sex abuse scandals, the apathy of the faithful, the hostility of the Italian government—as well as their own internal crises of faith.

Somewhat shockingly, the series was a sleeper hit. That could be in part because the erudite theological discussions are finely counterbalanced by a bracing dose of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Indeed, Catholics have been divided by the unabashed displays of sacreligious imagery, beginning with the opening credits that depict cloistered nuns giving themselves over to a nightly bacchanal. It gets worse from there: Church officials are portrayed as venal and manipulative; priests cheerfully break the seal of the Confessional; Cardinals carry on coke-fueled illicit affairs; and pervading all is deep cynicism, a base careerism, a sense that Church offices are little more than an expense account and a blank check for abuse.

The faithful may recoil at such portrayals; secular viewers may enjoy the schadenfreude of having all of their prejudices confirmed. I have my own mixed feelings. 

But it’s also impossible to dismiss, if only because Sorrentino also supplies some of the most deeply-felt portraits of faith in all of popular culture. In line with Flannery’s injunction about what can happen in life, Sorrentino’s outrageous depictions come into focus as artistic choices that serves a larger—and sneakily sympathetic—vision of the life of the Church. The crowd-pleasing techno-pop, the irreverence, the garishness, corruption, and sin—these are all the clay out of which he shapes, with uncommon empathy, his investigations into the unexpected workings of grace.

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The Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.
—Flannery O’Connor, Catholic Novelists and Their Readers

Sorrentino says he’s a non-believer; we should take him at his word. But when it comes to analyzing his art, it doesn’t matter all that much one way or another. As Flannery argues again and again, intentions are not dispositive; the most devout believer can make flimsy art. What matters is an aesthetic fidelity to reality.

What does that mean, in practice? To begin with, it means achieving a convincing portrayal of the regular, day-to-day stuff of life. That is especially true if you work in sci-fi or fantasy or magical realism and intend to break certain rules. Flannery again: “...The natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that [the artist’s] obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.” Catholic notions of sacramentality assert that the transcendent emerges through, not in opposition to, the material world. Thus the supernatural mysteries of both the reality of evil and the reality of grace must operate within a context of believable characters and a coherent fictional world.

Avowedly Catholic filmmakers, like Scorcese and Malick, have created heartbreaking works portraying the dramatic sacrifices of the martyrs. This is all to the good; the martyrs show us the limit. But in the Pope series, Sorrentino does something different, and maybe even a bit harder, which is to sympathetically and entertainingly portray the mundanity of the religious experience. Not in the sense of dullness, but in the baffling interweaving of our humble, internal, daily battles with the moments of transcendence that leave us as quickly as they come, like the sudden familiar fragrance we catch in passing on the street.

And, having given the often distressing natural conditions of the Church their due, he proceeds to take its supernatural nature yet more seriously. His universe is full of miracles, visions, angelic intercessions. The anticipated reveal—that they are all hallucinations, misunderstandings, or tricks—never comes. They are presented seamlessly as plain fact, perplexing the faithful most of all. 

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The Church need not think. It needs only to protect the fragile. Our mission is to recognize, preserve, and value fragility…

Wherever there is fragility, there is the Church.
—Sir John Brannox, The New Pope

If Sorrentino manages to inhabit irony without becoming cynical, celebrate pop culture without degrading into superficiality, honor tenderness without indulging in sentimentality, and respect the Church’s power without either condemnation or obsequiousness, it is because his true subject is not sex or drugs or even ecclesial corruption. It is both smaller and larger than that. 

It is weakness and fragility. It is loneliness and isolation, and consequently all the ways we seek to stave it off. It is the small but momentous movements of the heart that break us through that isolation. 

Loneliness is the lodestar of Sorrentino’s Vatican. There is Lenny’s constitutional loneliness as an abandoned orphan—his obsession with finding his parents, or failing that finding a new father and mother in the Church. There is the loneliness of Diane Keaton’s Sister Mary, who fears she can never achieve her deepest desire: to heal Lenny of his orphanhood and give him a happy family.

There is the loneliness of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Voiello, who lives enclosed in himself as the only man who can do what it takes, make the hard decisions, always be the bad guy. Cardinal Bernardo Gutierrez, meanwhile, is at the bottom of an ocean of loneliness, as a gay man, an alcoholic, and a victim of sexual abuse—all of which he feels he must hide and repress to serve the Church, but which in fact become the doorways of his transformation.

There is Esther, the devout laywoman, who is abandoned by her husband, abused by priests, manipulated by her lovers, and is finally drawn to someone even lonelier than herself, a physically deformed man too ashamed to leave his room. 

And there is the brilliant Brannox, isolated in his vast estate, repudiated by his family, convinced he is a reject and a fraud. His crushing parental voice rings constantly in his ears—God doesn’t like you—which he vainly drowns in drugs and intellectual pursuits. 

Hanging over all this personal desolation is the specter of a seemingly absent and capricious God. That hole feels all the larger for how desperately everyone in the Vatican has structured their lives around it. Their individual lonelinesses echo together in this vaster cavern. When an echo hits something solid deep in the depths, some unmistakable sign of God’s presence—Esther’s pregnancy, Lenny’s miracles, Voiello’s devotion to his only friend Giralomo—the brief flashes of joy soon recede back into suspicion and disappointment over their transience.

Flannery criticized an artistic age that has “domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.” Sorrentino shows us despair, yes. But no one in his universe has happily embraced it; even the most bitter and vengeful give a glance over their shoulder as they slam the door on God, the slightest hesitation revealing their ineradicable but unspeakable hope.

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There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected.
—Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction

In her essays, Flannery describes the difficulty of communicating the nature of the sacraments to an unsympathetic audience:

When I write a novel in which the central action is a baptism, I am very well aware that for a majority of my readers, baptism is a meaningless rite, and so in my novel I have to see that this baptism carries enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance. To this end I have to bend the whole novel—its language, its structure, its action. I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts. Distortion in this case is an instrument; exaggeration has a purpose…

She goes on to describe one of the chief dangers for religious art, which is to reduce the audience’s natural curiosity for an unfamiliar world to just another source of piquant voyeurism. In careless hands, it can become a way of flattering the sensibilities of the sophisticated, who congratulate themselves for being open-minded enough to enjoy a bit of slumming among the savages.

It’s thus a huge difficulty for an artist to present the sacraments not as a curio or a relic of a dead past, but rather as a living reality. As something that counts, at least for the characters and world of the story.

Strangely, Sorrentino accomplishes it. Strangely, because, as far as we know, he himself does not hold this view of the sacraments. He does give us a distorted and exaggerated view of them—in the sense Flannery means. The distortions are a “lie that tells the truth,” to misquote Picasso.

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Take the climactic exchange between Gutierrez and Brannox in the confessional. Brannox, now Pope John Paul III, has just finished laying bare his worst sins: that he stole the writing of his dead brother—a death he was partially responsible for—and passed it off as his own. That he built an entire career, up to and including his papacy, on this fraud. And that, to top it off, he’s an active heroin addict. 

It’s hardly random that he chooses Cardinal Gutierrez for this confession: Gutierrez, who admires him starry-eyed, who trusts him, one of his closest friends. Self-destructive types may recognize the way Brannox recklessly throws his trash at the feet of an important relationship. He seeks not forgiveness, but to indulge the impulse to ruin love. He knows that Gutierrez’s respect is based on a lie, and he wants the relief of casting it off, to wallow in being finally understood—finally, inevitably rejected, once and for all.

Gutierrez, the wisest of Sorrentino’s characters, sees through this immediately. Instead, he responds:

Gutierrez: Have you finished, Holy Father?

Brannox: Is that not enough?

Gutierrez: No. It is not enough to not be forgiven. 

God saves us. Always. God does not deny anyone the grace of salvation. It is the most beautiful thing there is…We love vanity and sin. We love depravation and wickedness. So we believe that God has abandoned us. That God does not like us. But, God does not manage our lives. He does not correct our weaknesses. God does not stop our hand when it plunges into sin. No. All he does is save us. In the end, God saves us. And he saves us with a kiss. Just like with Moses. 

Pretty good theology. And more, this is suffused with a certain alloy of tenderness and steel that one haltingly learns is proprietary to the spiritual life. There is nothing, nothing you can do to poison the divine love for you, it says—but, also, it’s time to grow up, put aside childish things, and stop living in the past.

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Growth is the only evidence of life, Cardinal Newman used to say. But the everlasting question is: do I want to grow? Do I want to live?
—Sir John Brannox

So, after all this, what to make of Sorrentino’s most unsparing portrayals of degradation, the sex and sacrilege, his rendition of corruptio optimi pessima? Is it just gratuitous bile or is there a bit of the triune intuition here?

I do sympathize with those who find many scenes flippant, sacrilegious, pornographic. One response is to handwave: it’s not smut, it’s just, like, European, man. The more earnest response is to recognize that it is a painfully true to life account—even if we are to take it seriously, and not literally (to coin a phrase). The fact is, the Vatican financial institutions are full of corruption. The fact is, the hierarchy has conspired to excuse, downplay, coverup, and enable all manner of abuse and sexual license. 

Arguing that these faults are just a share in the full-spectrum failures of nearly all our major institutions, while partly true, is not good enough. Arguing that highlighting it is somehow “bad for the Church” is, in my humble opinion, disgusting PR-speak and part of the mentality that fed the problems in the first place. And putting the onus on artists not to depict it at all is inimical to their vocation. Sorrentino’s sympathy works for the audience because his gaze is so unsparing, and that gaze is so agonizing because he has successfully portrayed the deep longings of his characters, and all the ways they are betrayed. 

Surely, the series may bolster a certain secular viewpoint that looks at Sorrentino’s Vatican and sees lonely, wounded, fundamentally deformed—if at times idealistic—men and women who have attached themselves to an absurd institution out of family pressure, cultural inertia, or simple lack of options. In this reading, the predators among them recognize that the culture of secrecy and paranoia that has built up in the Church bureaucracy is the perfect place to hole up and groom their victims. For the orphans and the addicts and the life-long victims, they have found the ultimate co-dependent blanket, filled with narcissistic abusers that will never discard them.

And the opposing view from the religious seats? Well—basically similar, with the very important addition of the Holy Spirit.

If that is too glib, it’s not by much. The Catholic belief is not that everyone is baptized, and poof, is a wonderful human being; growth is a long, slow, fraught battle. Nor is it that the Church attracts only the best people, the top men. No, to the contrary. It welcomes and fortifies not just the brilliant thinkers and artists, the Anscombes and Augustines, but even moreso the sludge of humanity (many times both in the same person). It is not a courtroom, not a museum, not a university, nor even a philanthropy. It is a field hospital—such a hospital being, of course, the destination of those mutilated by war.

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Sorrentino may not believe in the efficacy of the sacraments, but he certainly believes in the desperation and the dignity of the mutilated. He is willing to credibly portray his characters’ own belief in God, and His ability to turn sludge into gold. He even appears quite familiar with the divine jiu-jitsu with which God turns the greatest flaws and failures to the good. His characters are so many Jonahs, reluctant saints who flee from their missions only to find circumstances conspiring to place them right where they need to be.

Gutierrez, terrified to even set foot outside, is sent to New York City to investigate clerical abuse and confront a seemingly invincible opponent. He succeeds where no one else could, not despite his timidity, anxiety, and alcoholism—but because of them. Because his traumatic past gives him entry into the motivations of both the victims and the perpetrators that a stronger man would lack.

The titular popes, Lenny and Brannox, likewise only slowly come to accept the power of their weaknesses. Lenny may be arrogant and imperious, relying on secrecy and a tightly-managed public image to enhance his authority, but it is by being embarrassed and exposed that he wins the loyalty of the faithful. His teenage love letters, leaked to destroy him, instead reveal the depth of the heart he keeps hidden.

Brannox, especially, must be dragged along to his destiny. He must be cajoled and manipulated into accepting the papacy, which requires him, if not overcoming, at least over-stepping the great interior narratives of his life: that he is a failure, a fraud, a performer, an outcast, an addict. 

All of those things are, in fact, true. But they are not the full truth. Brannox is drawn out of himself, past those truths, which are illuminated in a new context. They are not denied, nor even strictly speaking healed—but transfigured, and put to use for greater ends. His alienation and loneliness and fear of God is precisely what touches a deep chord with an alienated and lonely and fearful world. He does not become a “better person” in the manner of us moderns with our mindfulness apps and diets and New Years’ resolutions. He becomes a more real person, more substantial, more engaged with the stream of life, more willing and able to confront his suffering.

And when, in the end, Brannox seems to have fallen from the heights—personal, rhetorical, moral—that he reached as pope, when he seems to have abandoned his religious vocation, we can wonder if even this is not a sign of God’s work: the end of his isolation and his pretending, the end of his futile striving to take the place of his dead brother, the end of living only as self-punishment, the end of refusing to accept his forgiveness. These things, too, can happen in life. 

1. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, 1904

2. A quote proverbially too good to check.

3. “The Church is a hospital, and not a courtroom, for souls. She does not condemn on behalf of sins, but grants remission of sins…In the Church, those worried acquire merriment, and those saddened, joy. In the Church, the troubled find relief, and the heavy-laiden, rest.” St. John Chrysostom (347-407 A.D.)