Conclave Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Leadership, Uncertainty
Conclave
This is a film about uncertainty. I am going to be an advocate for uncertainty
in this post about it. But I am certain
about one thing: this is a film worth seeing – and seeing it in the theater if you
have the opportunity to do that. In
fact, I think that the scene during which Dean Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes)
articulates how a new pope should be chosen should be required viewing before
any political convention, but also before making a decision about hiring or
appointing a person for any executive role.
The essence of the speech, I think, is that we want a leader who is
uncertain, not one who is certain; a leader who is curious, not one who already knows
the answer, including to questions that have not yet been asked, but also to those that have been visited many times.
But don’t we want a leader who knows the way? Why would we hire a guide to lead us through
the jungle if they didn’t know something about the paths that are available,
the risks that exist, and how to prepare for them? Well, I do think that is one of the
shortcomings of this film. In reaching
for the answer to this two-pronged dilemma – the need for expertise, for
knowledge, for a plan; and the need for openness and the ability to embrace novelty
– we can err on either side, and I think this film portrays that in a very
provocative way. I won’t reveal the
particular provocative twist – one that was clearly intentional and intentionally
corrective and therefore critical of the church – but will speak to the more
prosaic difficulties of erring on the side of openness. As my wife says, we should have open minds,
but not so open that our brains fall out…
What is portrayed in this film; richly, lushly, but also
realistically, is the process of making a group decision – a political decision
– and the intrigue but also the personalities and characters that are involved
in that process. In order to make
statements that are universal, this film anchors itself in the particular, and
that particular contains within it some stark realities that are represented in terms of the process, but also visually as well as in
the plot and the dialogue.
One of the odd particularities of choosing a pope is that
the chosen person must come from a very tiny pool – the Cardinals that are assembled for
the conclave. They must choose one of
the people assembled to make the decision, all are voting members, and they are locked onto
seclusion – conclave – until they reach a decision as the result of an
iterative process where they cast one secret ballot after another until an
individual emerges as the choice of the majority. Initially there are many options, but those
get winnowed down across time and, eventually, a leader emerges – a leader who (at least in principle) has not campaigned for himself but is discovered to be the best candidate as a
result of the lived process of making the decision.
Visually, the Vatican is the particular place of this decision
making and the vestments of the church play a not insignificant role in defining
the film. The colors are arresting. The crimsons of the cardinals’ clerical garb
are lavish. The build up towards the
pageantry of the decisional process is a visual feast. At the same time, there are more prosaic
elements. Putting the Cardinals on a bus
to drive from the dormitory to the Sistine Chapel to engage in the voting
procedure allows the modern world to intrude into this highly ritualized
ancient rite that is intended to be hermetically sealed from the outside (modern)
world. That seal is even more
dramatically and violently broken at a critical moment in the vote casting to
underscore the ways in which no process, no matter how sacred, can quite rise
above the outside influences; the very real political environment, that
surrounds every decision of import.
On a smaller scale, there was something depressing about the
communal eating space for the Cardinals and the cells of the dormitory they stayed
in. Yes, the eating space emphasized the
gender differences between the Cardinals and the Nuns who served them, but it
was more than the privilege of the males, it was the feel of the room that the
food was served in that reeked of gender differences. Even though the silverware and china and crystal
goblets were meticulously curated, the room itself felt much more like a school
cafeteria than a noble or even holy space.
It felt hollow – in a way that (forgive my sexism here) spaces designed
by men for function rather than form – feel.
There was a kind of Dickensian bleakness; the conspicuous consumption couldn’t
quite hide the underlying lack in lives that are devoid of a feminine
engagement with the textures of cloth, the softness of upholstery, and the
warmth of wood that make the ceremonial spaces seem more inviting than the hard
marbles of the living spaces; the living spaces that seem to be designed to be cleaned
rather than lived in.
The decisional dilemma is presented as one that has initially
has five viable options for the next Pope – and they are each members of pretty traditional
categories. At one end of the spectrum,
there is the conservative MAGA candidate (the film was released before the US
election with, I think, the now apparently vain hope that it would influence
that decision). The candidate representing
this conservative, let’s put the genie back in the bottle vision is Cardinal
Tedesco (Sergio
Castellitto), who wants to return to the Latin Liturgy and return to having
an Italian Pope; himself. More centrally
and controversially, he sees the interactions with other faiths as a war – especially
with the Muslims, and he wants to arm the Christian soldiers to engage in a
fight to the death with infidels.
Two other conservative, but less reactionary candidates are
also in the mix. Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), a power
motivated political operative in a culture where open campaigning for the
office is forbidden. His bid for power
is defeated when his scheming is exposed – in a very powerful scene where
Sister Agnes (Isabella
Rossellini) clarifies that though the women are given no official power, they have
eyes and ears and can influence the process through sharing what they
know. Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian
Msamati) is an African Cardinal whose blackness would help modernize the
image of the church as representative of its entire congregation, though his
strong stance against homosexuality keeps him solidly in the conservative side
of the group. Ultimately his youthful
behavior exposed by political skullduggery will scuttle his candidacy.
On the liberal end of the spectrum is Cardinal Bellini from
America (Stanley Tucci)
who pushes all the liberal buttons in terms of issues like sexuality and expanding
the role of women in the church and acts the part of the liberal candidate,
pretending he is not interested in becoming the Pope while deeply wanting to have
the position and especially the power that comes with it – and assuming that
all of the others, like him, not so secretly want that power. The first dark horse candidate to emerge is
Dean Thomas Lawrence, also a liberal. In
his opening speech, intended to set a tone and apparently endorsing Bellini as
the liberal (uncertain) candidate, Lawrence demonstrates the kind of leadership
that at least some in the group long for and that his speech both cries out for and embodies. Not surprisingly, then, he
garners more votes on the first ballot than he bargained for – or actually had
interest in receiving.
Lawrence asserts himself, then, as an interesting character –
one whom we know was very close to the deceased Pope (along with Bellini), who
is interested in the church changing, but genuinely has no interest in leading
those changes. He has had a crisis of
faith and wanted to leave the post of Dean – among whose duties is to lead the
group through the discernment process for choosing the next Pope – but the
prior Pope put pressure on him to remain in his post, and it becomes apparent
that he is the right man for the job – and apparently for the Papacy. Plato let us know in the Republic that the philosopher
king who has no interest in the job can be exactly the right person for it.
But Lawrence is not the only dark horse candidate. There is a new Cardinal – the Cardinal of
Kabul – who shows up at the conclave.
This Cardinal was made a cardinal in secret to protect him from the
cabal in Kabul who would surely have executed him if he was known to have a
high office in the church. Lawrence
meets him, makes the decision that he belongs in the conclave, and befriends
him, as do an increasingly broad pool of other Cardinals. This relatively young and certainly new memeber of the group of Cardinals, Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is originally from
Mexico and has served in war torn areas.
When the ultra-conservative Tedesco
makes his impassioned plea for war on the infidels, it is Benitez who is able,
in a very Christ-like fashion, to confront him.
Pointing out that he has served in multiple war-torn communities – most recently
in Afghanistan; he takes the position that the church should not be stoking
war, but making the case for peaceful resolutions to conflict. The impact on the Cardinals (and the audience
of the film) is powerful. It felt like
the moment in my life when I was at a basketball game where the players for the
college where I teach got into a brawl with the players from our cross-town
rivals and I was screaming “kill them” or something equally inappropriate and
my 12-year-old son – standing beside me in the stands – said, “Dad, those are
our friends.”
So, Benitez, unknown to the Cardinals (and played, in this cast of
notables, by an unknown actor), becomes the darling of the conclave. This may seem like a spoiler, but I don’t
think it is. Benitez’ role as the dark
horse who becomes the favorite son is more than hinted at. He is compared to the turtles that inhabit
one of the fountains near the chapel.
These turtles keep wandering off and need to be brought back to the fountain
which is their home. Turtles seem to me
to be creatures who are benign – they don’t hurt others – they are cold blooded
and need heat from the world to survive.
They are laconic – somewhat other worldly - and have built shells to
protect them from a dangerous world.
Benitez, like the turtles, seems both soft on the inside, but also hard
enough on the outside to be protected against those who would attack him or, in
the position of Pope, sway him from his principles.
Of course, my concern, as it became apparent that the film was
tilting towards anointing Benitez, is that empowering a stranger to lead the
community is fraught with danger. We
should thoroughly vet candidates before we appoint them to positions. What we discover after the fact may turn out
to be something that we should have known ahead of time. That turns out to be the case here, but the
discovery (which I won’t spoil) is presented as both revolutionary and benign –
even noble.
Ultimately, the Cardinals listen to Thomas – they choose a leader
that they are uncertain of – and one who articulates the value of being
uncertain. That said, the pragmatics of
running an organization as complicated as the Catholic Church (or the United
States Government) without deep knowledge of the institution and the people
inside it seems to be realistically risky, at best. My conservative roots would make it hard from
me to join that consensual decision at the end.
But I admire and resonate with the intent behind the film – to help us
have faith that our intuitive selves, and the intuitive beings around us – are
not just competent, but the preferred leaders in our communities.
Uncertainty is scary. When
I was an intern in Houston, we had a clinician, an expert in psychoanalytic and
in suicide present to us. His position
was that suicidal clients need to come to terms with their desire to kill
themselves. He told a particularly
chilling story of driving away from a multi-story parking structure after a session with a
suicidal patient, leaving her standing at the railing on the top floor thinking
about jumping, not knowing whether she would do that or not.
The traditional thing to do at that point would be to call the
police to come to intervene to prevent her from hurting herself. His position was different. It was that we need to trust that people have
the right – indeed it is necessary – to sort out the most difficult aspects of
their life in a way that will ultimately make sense to them and that will allow
them to live with the decisions that they make.
To force someone to live – by keeping them away from the ledge – does not
resolve the difficulty. Only they can do
that.
While I am not endorsing his decision to leave while his patient
was in a dangerous space (and the research suggests that suicide is also an
impulsive decision and if we reduce access to easy means of suicide the rate of
suicide in an area goes down), the ability to hold still while a patient considers
options – to let the material emerge without knowing where it will go – to provide
an environment that allows people to feel safe in not knowing and safe in
trying out hypotheses and doing thought experiments to see what the consequences
of particular actions are – these are all essential tools of the analytic
therapist and part of the engagement in psychoanalysis proper. The leader of the psychoanalytic treatment,
like Thomas’ ideal leader of the Church, should learn or by nature be prepared
to be uncertain – to be curious – but also to have faith that the uncertainty
will lead in a fruitful direction.
The analytic paradox that the movie portrays in the political
setting is that Lawrence is certain that his methods – being uncertain - will
lead to the best possible outcome. The
particular outcome that the movie lands on is being used to argue against the
value of the method – at least from more conservative commentators – because the process takes a decidedly liberating dimension that can be read as a
traditional liberal position. Of course,
that is inherent, I believe, in the psychoanalytic method – even if
psychoanalytic politics are frequently quite conservative and we seem to get to
the table very late on a number of liberal issues where we could have been leaders, but we end up contributing our considerable fire power to the cause often after the fact (and here I am talking
about our history of misogyny, homophobia, and racism).
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