Imagine a miniseries that has at its center a cynical, corrupt President Obama, arrogantly telling a minister “I don’t have any sins to confess.” Standing in front of an adoring crowd, this president says “I am a contradiction. I am God.” He tells an an enemy “I am willing to wage war without end against you!”
Then Obama proclaims, “They chose a president they didn’t know, and today, they begin to understand!” An interlocutor asks, “What do you intend to do?” He responds, “Revolution!”
This miniseries casting Obama as an evil schemer and revolutionary with a God complex has never been made, and would certainly never air on a powerful American channel. So of course, take all the quotes you just read, and realize this plot comes from a trailer of an HBO miniseries about...the first American pope.
Here we go again. Just like Showtime produced three seasons of a series reimagining an evil 15th century pontiff in The Borgias, now the Bill Maher Channel is importing from Italy The Young Pope, starring Jude Law as 47-year-old Lenny Belardo, who is installed in the present day as Pope Pius XIII.
Deborah Young of The Hollywood Reporter screened the first two hours of Paolo Sorrentino’s ten-hour miniseries at the Venice Film Festival and reports this “irreverent fantasy” of a “dangerously iconoclastic pontiff” was entertaining. This Pope “Lenny” is “arrogant, whimsical and hilariously destructive. How he ever got elected will no doubt be revealed in later episodes, but suffice it to say he comes off as a borderline anti-Christ not only in his power-mad dreams, but in all his dealings with the cardinals and the Curia.”
That question – how did an arrogant “borderline anti-Christ” get elected? – is the most insulting conceit of the whole enterprise. Catholics are taught the cardinals are guided by the Holy Spirit to choose a humble, faith-filled man to act as the vicar of Christ. Popes like the aforementioned Rodrigo Borgia show that humans aren’t always perfect at this process, but it’s deeply insulting – and meant to be deeply insulting – to imagine that this would happen in today’s Rome.
Don’t believe Sorrentino when he claims he’s simply approaching the Vatican “with curiosity and with honesty, without taking a provocative stance.”
What Young calls HBO’s “memorable megalomaniac” really channels the Hollywood Left. “In a scene high up on the dome of St. Peter's, he tempts his humble confessor with immense power if he'll break the secret of the confessional and tell him all the cardinals' sins, at the same time informing him that he personally doesn't believe in God.”
The Holy Father is the antithesis of Hollywood – and thus the perfect target for ridicule. The Pope calls the faithful to holiness; Hollywood projects the progressive, godless vision of humanity. The papal DNA is one of humility; Hollywood is filled with megalomaniacs with disdain for others. The Catholic Church invokes prayer; Hollywood provokes with irreverent satire, mocking everything that is holy and honoring and savoring every form of sexual deviance and ultraviolence.
Naturally, the critics see great potential for more than the first ten episodes. At least that is their hope. Their appetite for scheming, evil popes seems never to be satisfied, even as they start rolling out the first myth-making movies about Barack Obama and his irresistible charm and swagger.
