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Jan. 18th, 2017 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionThe Young Pope, episode 1
I guess we all must have figured that would be the hook, since it's the most powerful one available. "Tourists" indeed.
The Hamlet angle gives them wiggle room even there, though, I guess, which is probably dramatically necessary. Doubt is an inexpensive garden path but not necessarily a cheap one - those who might have qualms (or yawns) about Law's trajectory can be soothed or excited by whatever second face he presents, since it will presumably bring up the rather forceful reasons his first would have frozen that way.
Bet you a tiny dirty penny that they'll find some way to leave the God thing up in the air, ultimately. Because why wouldn't you? Since you can make this particular case while saying, "Sure, fine, we don't know, whatever, keep your magic asterisk," why endanger it by sewing it to the one that hurts much more while seeming to give in return much less?
Well, one can think of some reasons. Can Sorrentino et al.? We'll see what the show's commitments are. There's some intriguing hints:
Law's presented as remembering everything; Keaton tells him to push it aside, but surely this means he can't. At another point he tells her that everything is wrong. Probably he means with the world, a wrongness due in part to the fact that no pope seems able to say what he does in his first dream. His willingness to accept the status quo-championing Cardinal's judgement that he, too, is tied to the past probably means the personal and general wrongs he remembers are what motivate him, rather than that he is the heir to Peter and the entirety of Catholic tradition.
Everything comes back to the mother, they say at La Pietà 's feet, and the show's getting mileage out of the amazing fact that there's a monotheism-predating ancient earth mother idol in papal HQ, which the evil Cardinal is drawn to despite himself. Keaton may actually be his mother, from all we can tell so far, but is at least a stand-in. She calls Law the mother and father of the church (it's a kid who spots him off the tourist hall, and who calls him "papa," it sounded like).
A lot can be done with this: suggesting he has to alternately or somehow simultaneously lie (dadsplaining that we're tourists here with Heaven-issued passports) and tell the truth (the stuff of mom, our native earth) to do this job. We see it at the end, where that's what he has to do with the confessor, who has the same face of childish fear and need that the throngs in the dream did. He picks up on the Cardinal's point that a joke tells a truth despite itself (which he'd earlier thrown back at him by telling a "joke" that just underlined the ironic gap between what he'd expected from Law and what he instead found). This suggests the tightrope Law going forward will walk will be controlling the joke - saying things he doesn't believe in such a way that the beliefs of those who do are weakened at a sustainably slow rate, while not giving away that he doesn't believe them (which will lose him his paternal power).
His stated reason for not believing in God is that God has not managed to help him feel bad about his misdeeds, presumably because that's supposed to be the necessary first step to not repeating them - which we're reminded of frequently, because of how much confession's highlighted. I think we're to feel that Law had put the work in - prayer, confession, priesthood etc. - but God didn't come throug, leaving him no choice but to accept how fucked up he, Law, will always be - and thus reject God as a meaningful force in his life.
The radio's a pretty blatant symbol: the signals are not coming through. And, since the Pope's whole job is hypothetically to translate God's coded radio messages, and these are absent and he can't point this out, he needs to fill God's empty shoes (the "transitive" property he alludes to in another "joke"). "God's house" is the church, so the Vatican in one sense, and Law himself in another (a fact brought to our attention in the "it just took a few steps back" moment). He's thus the other inhabitant of the duplex; the private swimming pool and the big dipper are I guess suggestive of the Pope's role as chief water-blesser, thus saver of souls, and the "private" part maybe reminds us only he gets tomset the rules that direct this flow? Or is the pool the milky way itself?
Law's mommy problem will need more explaining. Keaton as much as says that he's got grand mal issues, and he certainly comes off that way when refusing the love of the earth mother-y cook (and pulling rank on her, as though her assumption that the one in charge is in her charge comprises a subtle coup - cue Vidal's anecdote about the Sicilian woman who held that Christ had to die because he was rude to his mother).
Young = modern, I imagine. Since all this other stuff is very old. Though there's a second possibility ... I was out of the room for the start, but Julie says he stepped out of a pile of babies? That could mean a lot of things, but one's he'd grown up and the others had not. Leaving him daddy by default? But where's the mother? If the mother is life, is the world, then probably all the natural and human-caused (thus also natural, since we're nature-caused) miseries she teems with are her unforgivable failing (daddy-God's is he's a deadbeat or a dream). But if he's from the pile, and though no longer a baby still Young, he's at best our older brother; we mustn't expect him to fully know what he's doing. He has to be both mother and father to us but he's hardly past childhood himself, at the jones-casey-baiting age of 47. Both sorts of Guttenbergian hijinx (Johnny's, Steve's) may ensue.
The orphanage scene is also very interesting if we read the opening image this way. It isn't that he never had a mother or a father - they were there when he was a young child. But now they're gone (or, if Keaton is in some fashion his mother, kept a heart-breaking "few feet away") ... and he seems to blame them for that.
Way too far up my alley, most of this, so I actually kind of hope I'm wrong about it, or at least that the show will have me thinking I am a lot of the time.
Oh: and the Cherry Coke Zero - he wants the taste without the calories, wants to somehow eat without eating. The cherry part adds a sexual hint, but also underlines the fact for those unaware of the difference between Diet and Zero that his hankering is hedonic. He's avoiding the various temptations the Cardinal wants to use to distract him into harmlessness, a practice which the spread of foods both represents and is probably the first instance of. The Satanic Cardinal is wily, though, and goes hunting for the "cherry."
Now wondering if the American coffee meant something more than being an Italy-traducing multiplier of the fuck-you of making the native-born Cardinal make it. Presumably espresso (or whatever Popes drink) stands in for all the long-established traditions of Vatican/Rome, what with their multi-step rituals, air of fanciness and importance, and their upholders' near-bullying level of open disdain for quicker, more vulgar alternatives. Does it matter that both cheap, mass-produced American beverages are caffeinated, though? Past helping tie the two scenes to one another? I'm curious because Chekhov used tea as a symbol, and Bishop does (one of the few where I'm still not always sure I've grasped what she means by it). That which wakes you up and/or keeps you awake, obviously - maybe here suggesting motivatiom, since Law seems to be worrying about staying on mission. Resting would mean passing his power on to the Cardinal, who would take up whatever matters the Pope avoided, the true point of that button.
What were the three temptations in the desert? Here they're feasting and veneration sans responsibility, to be joined by sex, surely, once the Cardinal's informants come through.
I guess we all must have figured that would be the hook, since it's the most powerful one available. "Tourists" indeed.
The Hamlet angle gives them wiggle room even there, though, I guess, which is probably dramatically necessary. Doubt is an inexpensive garden path but not necessarily a cheap one - those who might have qualms (or yawns) about Law's trajectory can be soothed or excited by whatever second face he presents, since it will presumably bring up the rather forceful reasons his first would have frozen that way.
Bet you a tiny dirty penny that they'll find some way to leave the God thing up in the air, ultimately. Because why wouldn't you? Since you can make this particular case while saying, "Sure, fine, we don't know, whatever, keep your magic asterisk," why endanger it by sewing it to the one that hurts much more while seeming to give in return much less?
Well, one can think of some reasons. Can Sorrentino et al.? We'll see what the show's commitments are. There's some intriguing hints:
Law's presented as remembering everything; Keaton tells him to push it aside, but surely this means he can't. At another point he tells her that everything is wrong. Probably he means with the world, a wrongness due in part to the fact that no pope seems able to say what he does in his first dream. His willingness to accept the status quo-championing Cardinal's judgement that he, too, is tied to the past probably means the personal and general wrongs he remembers are what motivate him, rather than that he is the heir to Peter and the entirety of Catholic tradition.
Everything comes back to the mother, they say at La Pietà 's feet, and the show's getting mileage out of the amazing fact that there's a monotheism-predating ancient earth mother idol in papal HQ, which the evil Cardinal is drawn to despite himself. Keaton may actually be his mother, from all we can tell so far, but is at least a stand-in. She calls Law the mother and father of the church (it's a kid who spots him off the tourist hall, and who calls him "papa," it sounded like).
A lot can be done with this: suggesting he has to alternately or somehow simultaneously lie (dadsplaining that we're tourists here with Heaven-issued passports) and tell the truth (the stuff of mom, our native earth) to do this job. We see it at the end, where that's what he has to do with the confessor, who has the same face of childish fear and need that the throngs in the dream did. He picks up on the Cardinal's point that a joke tells a truth despite itself (which he'd earlier thrown back at him by telling a "joke" that just underlined the ironic gap between what he'd expected from Law and what he instead found). This suggests the tightrope Law going forward will walk will be controlling the joke - saying things he doesn't believe in such a way that the beliefs of those who do are weakened at a sustainably slow rate, while not giving away that he doesn't believe them (which will lose him his paternal power).
His stated reason for not believing in God is that God has not managed to help him feel bad about his misdeeds, presumably because that's supposed to be the necessary first step to not repeating them - which we're reminded of frequently, because of how much confession's highlighted. I think we're to feel that Law had put the work in - prayer, confession, priesthood etc. - but God didn't come throug, leaving him no choice but to accept how fucked up he, Law, will always be - and thus reject God as a meaningful force in his life.
The radio's a pretty blatant symbol: the signals are not coming through. And, since the Pope's whole job is hypothetically to translate God's coded radio messages, and these are absent and he can't point this out, he needs to fill God's empty shoes (the "transitive" property he alludes to in another "joke"). "God's house" is the church, so the Vatican in one sense, and Law himself in another (a fact brought to our attention in the "it just took a few steps back" moment). He's thus the other inhabitant of the duplex; the private swimming pool and the big dipper are I guess suggestive of the Pope's role as chief water-blesser, thus saver of souls, and the "private" part maybe reminds us only he gets tomset the rules that direct this flow? Or is the pool the milky way itself?
Law's mommy problem will need more explaining. Keaton as much as says that he's got grand mal issues, and he certainly comes off that way when refusing the love of the earth mother-y cook (and pulling rank on her, as though her assumption that the one in charge is in her charge comprises a subtle coup - cue Vidal's anecdote about the Sicilian woman who held that Christ had to die because he was rude to his mother).
Young = modern, I imagine. Since all this other stuff is very old. Though there's a second possibility ... I was out of the room for the start, but Julie says he stepped out of a pile of babies? That could mean a lot of things, but one's he'd grown up and the others had not. Leaving him daddy by default? But where's the mother? If the mother is life, is the world, then probably all the natural and human-caused (thus also natural, since we're nature-caused) miseries she teems with are her unforgivable failing (daddy-God's is he's a deadbeat or a dream). But if he's from the pile, and though no longer a baby still Young, he's at best our older brother; we mustn't expect him to fully know what he's doing. He has to be both mother and father to us but he's hardly past childhood himself, at the jones-casey-baiting age of 47. Both sorts of Guttenbergian hijinx (Johnny's, Steve's) may ensue.
The orphanage scene is also very interesting if we read the opening image this way. It isn't that he never had a mother or a father - they were there when he was a young child. But now they're gone (or, if Keaton is in some fashion his mother, kept a heart-breaking "few feet away") ... and he seems to blame them for that.
Way too far up my alley, most of this, so I actually kind of hope I'm wrong about it, or at least that the show will have me thinking I am a lot of the time.
Oh: and the Cherry Coke Zero - he wants the taste without the calories, wants to somehow eat without eating. The cherry part adds a sexual hint, but also underlines the fact for those unaware of the difference between Diet and Zero that his hankering is hedonic. He's avoiding the various temptations the Cardinal wants to use to distract him into harmlessness, a practice which the spread of foods both represents and is probably the first instance of. The Satanic Cardinal is wily, though, and goes hunting for the "cherry."
Now wondering if the American coffee meant something more than being an Italy-traducing multiplier of the fuck-you of making the native-born Cardinal make it. Presumably espresso (or whatever Popes drink) stands in for all the long-established traditions of Vatican/Rome, what with their multi-step rituals, air of fanciness and importance, and their upholders' near-bullying level of open disdain for quicker, more vulgar alternatives. Does it matter that both cheap, mass-produced American beverages are caffeinated, though? Past helping tie the two scenes to one another? I'm curious because Chekhov used tea as a symbol, and Bishop does (one of the few where I'm still not always sure I've grasped what she means by it). That which wakes you up and/or keeps you awake, obviously - maybe here suggesting motivatiom, since Law seems to be worrying about staying on mission. Resting would mean passing his power on to the Cardinal, who would take up whatever matters the Pope avoided, the true point of that button.
What were the three temptations in the desert? Here they're feasting and veneration sans responsibility, to be joined by sex, surely, once the Cardinal's informants come through.
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Date: 2017-01-18 06:54 pm (UTC)W/r/t the heart of your post what did you make of the line "where there are rites, earth order reigns?"
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Date: 2017-01-18 10:22 pm (UTC)Sounds relevant to the earth mother stuff, though, and to how Voiello seems to inadvertently worship her. Do they really call it Ops? That's hilarious.
Yeah, I doubt Lenny's going to have such an easy time of it with Voiello after day 1.
I wonder if any of these names mean anything. Past Mary's, of course. Voiello sounds like ... vowel?