Conclave and the Art of the Twist

This week I'm wrong about an Oscar favorite's thematic evisceration of conservatism, plus spur of the moment movie trips and prescriptivism

This frame is one of many that captures Conclave’s central critique

For the past month, I have been ranting and raving to anyone who will listen about the movie Conclave. A tight mystery thriller about a bunch of old men (and a few old women) holding a highly ritualistic and secretive meeting to decide who will be the next Pope, it is, to put it simply, a really really good movie. The cast—Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, John Lithgow, a deep bench of character actors and new arrivals—is probably universally too young to play the characters they‘re portraying, but they’re clearly relishing the chance to unleash their charisma on such dramatic, over-the-top material. It says something about the quality of a cast when Tucci is the weakest link. There are resurfaced sex-scandals, bribes, vape pens, a previously unknown Cardinal appointed in secret. The vast majority of the movie is people in beautiful settings gossiping in alternating hushed and raised voices while wearing dramatic, flowing, colorful garments—not unlike the Real Housewives franchise (complimentary). The cinematography, direction, and score are all fantastic. It’s a favorite to do well at the academy awards. As far as a review goes, I’m fully recommending it.

I saw the movie in late November, and pretty much immediately bought the book it’s based on and read that over the recent holiday. The book is mostly the same as the film, although it’s slightly less subtle in certain moments. One early scene—a sermon given by the protagonist (Lomeli in the book, Lawrence in the movie) is given more space to breathe that makes its compelling message—the power of uncertainty, humility, and doubt in leadership and faith—hit a little harder, but otherwise the film is almost entirely an improvement. While both establish the same primary thematic concerns, the movie deepens them visually in ways the book simply can’t (more on that later).

Most criticism of the movie has centered on the ending—SPOILER WARNING FOR THE REST OF THIS POST—WATCH THE MOVIE BEFORE READING ON PLEASE—where a new Pope is chosen, and that Pope, Benitez, is revealed to be intersex (this is another interesting, small difference between the book and movie—the medical details of Benitez’s abandoned plans to get gender-affirming surgery are slightly, and in my mind meaningfully, different—but I’ll leave an exploration of that to those more informed and knowledgeable). Critics have ranged from conservatives, especially conservative Catholics, who find the ending blasphemous and disrespectful to people who simply found the twist sudden, unearned, and out of place.

I think both of those general critiques are wrong—but I want to focus on how Conclave’s twist, while only coming into focus in the last five minutes and seemingly unrelated to the major conflicts of the film, is actually a brilliant, resonant choice that deepens the movie’s central thematic tensions and builds on, rather than distracts from, its major conflicts.

Conclave, the film, is deeply interested in conservatism—specifically its fundamental fallacy that there is a true, consistent, old, better way of being that has been abandoned and must be restored. In our world, that conservatism almost always manifests as a longing for patriarchal (and often for historically white and wealthy) institutions, for state-sanctioned violence against “undesirables,” and for a repression of any noticeable difference in behavior, appearance, or speech. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and deviations from the right way are the source of all problems and discontent in the world. The movie is focused on the Catholic church, but that critique applies to social conservatism in all forms and contexts. In the United States, we are in a reactionary political moment where the rollback of DEI initiatives, the dismissal of misogyny and sexual assault as reasons to punish or even criticize powerful men, and the disappearance of the idea that an equitable society is even desirable reflect a socially powerful, conservative-dominated movement to “return” to systems that ultimately benefit oligarchical power. That movement manifests in places as disparate as the rejection of vaccines and basic public health standards like pasteurization, to social media allowing sexist, homophobic, and transphobic language as part of what they call legitimate debate, to the desire to cripple the economy by deporting millions of hardworking, law-abiding undocumented people, to the war on unhoused people in major cities—I could go on. It’s important to note this conservative impulse is bipartisan and harmful (often deadly) in every circumstance, and that there are far more examples than I listed here.

Conclave’s central conservative character, Cardinal Tedesco (played brilliantly by Sergio Castellito, who absolutely absconds with every scene he’s in) embodies this conservatism in the context of the Catholic Church. He’s obsessed with restoring a latin liturgy that nobody would actually understand, he wants to sideline women even more completely within the Church. He angrily says “we haven’t had an Italian Pope in forty years!” He argues that accepting Muslim immigrants in western nations without crushing their religion and culture is a mistake that will destroy the Church and the larger geo-political system it exists within. He passionately contends that a relatively liberal era in the Church that moved away from a single, correct, traditional way of being (that conveniently places Italian men like himself at the center of power) will result in its eventual implosion.

The book lets the liberal characters provide spirited, but predictable, counters to Tedesco. The actual issues within Catholicism that the book (and script) consider are surface level and without much nuance, which is fine—both are ultimately political thrillers rather than treatises.

But the film brilliantly presents a visual argument against Tedesco’s brand of conservatism. Tedesco consistently (and hilariously) takes hits from a vape pen. The Cardinals, figureheads of a fundamentally conservative and traditional institution, roll colorful plastic luggage across the beautiful Renaissance architecture of Vatican City. A bored Cardinal swipes on his touch-phone while waiting for a ceremony to begin. The Cardinals are ferried between their quarters and the Sistine Chapel in shiny white vans. A key scene involves a Cardinal in flowing, beautiful, ceremonial robes struggling with a copier. The director, Edward Berger, obsessively contrasts visuals that fit within conservative, traditional concepts of aesthetics with modern technology and infrastructure. The effect is comedic, but also highlights the fundamental flaw of the idea of “returning” to a more traditional time—change is inevitable regardless of our acceptance of it. Reactionary social conservatism is fundamentally, inherently, arguing for something impossible and that has actually never existed.

The Catholic Church cannot simultaneously serve a billion people spread throughout the world and prioritize Latin, Italian popes, and a purely European aesthetic and value system. You cannot drink raw milk without people regularly getting sick. Claiming trans people are mentally ill will not prevent them from existing. The world does not exist on a binary of the right, proper, traditional way things should be on one hand, and everything else on the other. There is no tradition that is not permeated by the (changing) moment.

The twist at the end of Conclave, Benitez’s reveal as an intersex person, comes out of nowhere in plot terms. A few throwaway lines early in the movie hint he is hiding a “medical problem,” but the movie is not at all interested in examining the lived experience of intersex people, or Catholic doctrine on sexual biology.

But the reveal is deeply thematically resonant. Intersex people do not fit into a traditional Eurocentric view of the world. “Sex is binary” is a conservative mantra at the root of much of the misogyny and homophobia and transphobia that afflicts our world. Conclave brilliantly has every character—liberal and conservative—treat the binary concept of gender as a given. The role of women within the Church is debated, the categories of “men” and “women” as social constructs are not. The battles are about embracing limited change versus attempting to reject change entirely (which feels similar, to me, to the fundamental debates in our most recent elections)—and nobody confronting the truth that the debate is ultimately moot, that change comes inevitably and all we can do is adapt to it. The ending reminds us that all these characters are deeply conservative in the simplicity of their worldview.

Benitez becomes a living embodiment of the failure of traditional binaries. About 1 in 60 people have intersex traits. The world does not exist, in reality, in binary simplicity. Benitez is also from a poor family in the third world, a person of color, whose work has primarily served victims of sexual violence. His physical being is a rejection of a conservative vision of Catholicism, and of larger Patriarchal concepts of masculinity and systems of power.¹

The twist is brilliant because it deepens the central argument that the simplistic debates featured in the film are reductions of reality, not descriptions of it. Obsessing over rules and procedures is another way of blinding yourself—and everyone, including us, the audience, is blind to Benitez’s truth until the end of the film.

The movie’s examination of conservatism is what makes it an effective film generally—it critiques the inherently reductive nature of western institutions, establishes that rigid (rather than dynamic) ritual and tradition consolidate human power but harm human experience—and the twist enhances the power of that argument. That’s what twists should do.

As for the arguments the film is blasphemous, I’ll leave that discussion to Catholics. I am very interested in what my Catholic friends think of the film—please share with me! But I’ll just say the film’s message is certainly not a targeted attack on the Church, but rather uses the Church as the vehicle to advance an argument about the society it exists within.

Rushing to the Movies

When I first saw Conclave, my brother was visiting with me in Brooklyn. On my way home from the gym, I had the thought to go to a movie, checked the showtimes, and saw the only theater with the movie had its only showing starting 10 minutes later.

I walked into my apartment, told my brother I was taking a two minute shower, and if he wanted to see Conclave then he should be ready to go when I got out so we could make it. 10 minutes later, after a furious citibike, my hair still damp from the shower, we were sitting in the Nitehawk (a wonderful local brooklyn theater).

Later that night, I managed to lock my brother inside a friend’s apartment I was checking on. I had not previously realized it was logistically possible to do that, but I am an innovator in the field of dumb mistakes. That’s not really part of the story but it’s what I think about when I think about the movie.

I love going to the movies on the spur of the moment—rushing to beat the end of the the previews when I give into a sudden cinephilic impulse.

What’s your best rushing to the movie moment?

My Favorite Linguistic Debate

While we’re on the subject of social conservatism—my favorite battleground has always been linguistics. I am a proud Descriptivist—someone who believes the meaning and pronunciation of words are socially mediated, constantly changing, and reflect historical and cultural shifts. Prescriptivists hold the opposite view—that words mean that they mean, that shifting linguistic standards are signs of the moral degradation of society, and that people should be forced to use language in a single, correct way.

Prescriptivism can get pretty extreme—France has an official academy whose job it is to tell people how they’re using french wrong—but its very common in our society. Have you ever corrected someone for using the word “literally” incorrectly? Have you cringed when someone ended a sentence in a preposition, or said “like” too many times?

Congratulations! You were, even if only for a moment, a prescriptivist. You were resisting the natural, inevitable shift of language to reflect how its actually used and not how the most influential people of prior years decided it should be used.

I love talking about descriptivism and prescriptivism because they’re fascinating, but also because they’re deeply tied into how social conservatism wields power. Ideas about right and wrong ways of speaking and writing are used to diminish the cultural and intellectual accomplishments of women, people of color (especially Black people—see responses to AAVE and the Ebonics controversy), non-native speakers, and queer people, among others. Cardinal Tedesco is absolutely a prescriptivist.

I am here to tell you that the science of linguistics is clear—all dialects and languages, regardless of their social prestige, are equally capable of descriptive power (and therefore artistic merit and functional use). That doesn’t mean the way we use language doesn’t affect how other people see and view us—it just means that those differences are due to subjective preference tied up in historical biases, not the merit of the words or ideas being expressed.

Thank you for reading me nerd out about linguistics!

1. The actor is also a total unknown who has never been in a film before, stealing the show from a parade of celebrated and established actors—a little bit of meta commentary.