hysterias of continental europe: psychoanalysis and the pope?

Guilt Trip (2011)

Just last week, I saw two films from continental Europe (Italy, France) that revisit the timeless battle (that has been occurring since the beginning of history, as my students would write) between psychoanalysis and the Catholic church. No longer is this battle abstract or spiritual: it now involves the Supreme Pontiff himself. To be fair, in Maxence Paris' short narrative film, Guilt Trip, we never see the pope, only his hands dipping into a bowl of wafers, stroking his Dr. Evil looking cat, and as silhouette from the rear. But his crumbling monopoly on guilt is real. In Guilt Trip Madeleine has a spreading "birthmark" on her back, which says "Culpa" (guilt); her analyst find in it the location of the path of redemption, and the Pope sends 003, secret agent, to stop them. To top it off the analyst is a Jungian, in other words, a cross between an idolator and a protestant. To be frank, this film is at best cute, and at worst silly, but it is the silliness that makes it worthwhile to mention. In the sequence of the Pope's absent cameo, agent 003 calls in to the Pope, who we see with his hands inside a snack bowl of sacrificial hosts. As if snacking on the body of Christ were not enough, the Supreme Pontiff also uses puppets to actualize the telephone voices his lieutenants. As 003 calls, his puppet jingles with him, ensuring that not even the voices transmitted over satellite networks can avoid the doctrine of the Trinity. But its all wafers and puppets here, since the Trinity requires that the Church's government of the profane world be given divine authorization by default. Accordingly, the film gives us the pope not in his Substance or Spirit, but in close-ups of his profane accoutrements: his hat, his cat, his hands in the wafer bowl, his puppets.

Continental Europe's contemporary hysteria is really all about the Trinity, something that Giorgio Agamben's newly translated book, The Kingdom and the Glory, presents in philosophical-theological detail. Without getting into detail, let us just say that the present day english word "economy," finds its roots in Bible Greek's oikonomia, which for Aristotle simply meant household management, but for early-Christianity became the privileged word for God's government on earth. Why? Because it provided a model for conducting the Church's practical matters (a nasty affair as we all know) without God's micromanagement yet with His full authorization. In other words, a divine Bureaucracy given Patriot Act powers and armed with the most up to date instruments of communication and control.

 

Habemus Papam [We Have a Pope] (2011)

 It doesn't get much different when the Cardinals have cell phones and want to leave the Vatican to take a tour of Rome before the new Pope is announced. That's what happens in Nanni Moretti's film Habemus Papum, where the new Pope has a nervous breakdown and refuses to assume his duties. A psychoanalyst is called in, is unsuccessful because the cardinals ask him not to ask too sensitive questions, Pope Melville escapes, and in the waiting time two Cardinals try to leave the Vatican. "We have our cell phones, so just calls us when he's ready," one of them says. Of course, the rules are the rules and they are not allowed to leave. As Melville, played by Michel Picoli, wanders the streets of Rome, trying to remember his life, and reminiscing his failed theater career, we presented with one of the most silly sequences in cinema: the Cardinals playing a volleyball match organized by the psychoanalyst, who has been told he cannot leave the Vatican until the Pope is well. Here, Moretti dwells on sacrilegious genre crossing: these are volleyball matches filmed with all the requisite emotional music and time-axis manipulation. 

Final shot of Journal d'un Cure Champagne (1951)

But is it really sacrilegious? Theologically speaking, no. There is no prohibition on images of Church officials because in Catholicism the Church's authority is grounded not in the image but in the mystery. That being said, the rules of this profane world of images takes its toll. Cinema has a long history of making the clergy look silly without meaning to, just think of the monastery sequence from Rossellini's Paisa. Films, which deal in concrete photographic images, by definition defy representational hierarchies, ergo its hard to guarantee that a film shows religious authorities in a deferential light. That's why Bresson concludes Diary of a Country Priest (1951) with a voiceover and a close-up of a two dimensional crucifix. Any other image risks betraying the intensity of the film's spiritual truth.

Cinemascope complains that the film is not satirical enough. But it seems like Moretti has bigger fish to fry, since his target is not the Church, but the Trinitarian mystery itself. By far, the best sequences in the film are the ones in which the clergy hobble around under gigantic frescoes of the crucifixion. As the Cardinals vote for the new Pope, the camera tracks backwards to reveal a massive fresco dwarfing the elderly gentlemen sitting awkwardly in red robes. No wonder Pope Melville doesn't think he can live up to his responsibilities as God's right hand man. There is no better place for us to see the Pope's hysteria than the film's mise-en-scene.

Hysteria goes hand in hand with the birth of psychoanalysis. Neurologists of the turn of the century, confronted with women complaining of symptoms with no identifiable physiological causes, treated them with methods such as electroshock therapy and genital stimulation, with only limited success (and side-effects, both pleasant and unpleasant). Or they told their patients that they were lying. Freud said "why don't we hear what they have to say?" What he found was not that hysterical blabberings contained a code for the Truth, but that they had their own texture and structure, and thus the discovery of the unconscious. The psychoanalyst in Habemus Papam was useless to the Pope, but in his absence he elicited from Vatican a set of hysterical images. It should be mentioned that the analyst is in fact played by the director himself, and just as he orchestrates the inter-diocese volleyball game, he also orchestrates the film itself. Moretti plays analyst and elicits a series of hysterical images from the Vatican. Yet there is nothing essentially threatening here to Catholicism. That's the catch.

No wonder that Cinemascope says the film is pointless, and, on the other side, Christianity Today calls it a "premise without a thesis." That's hysteria silly! Honestly, I thought this film silly myself--but perhaps that's the point.