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eastofshane

supporting the shane as snoopy agenda

[ilya as woodstock], [ilya as woodstock pt. 2]

fruitgravies

ilya are you seeing this

(surprise under the cut 🏒)

insta • twt • bsky

911onabc

sister AND ex-boyfriend both believing you're in love with your best friend is crazy work. implying the only thing holding you back is his sexuality is even crazier work

kaphkas

Turn my haters to consumers / I make vets feel like they juniors 📿⛪️🕯️

meduseld

You know, one of the things I really liked about Thomas Cardinal Lawrence from Conclave is that he is that extremely rare character type in which his hypocrisy is actually a positive trait instead of a negative one.

Like throughout the whole movie he decries his flaws and the reasons why he shouldn't get the job, while propping up friends and candidates with the same vibes as him. Benitez even points it out, Lawrence has his vote because he doesn't want it, and wins for similar reasons. Lawrence gives a speech about having an imperfect Pope, one with doubts, thinking of Bellini of course and completely missing how it all applies to him. He's amazed that it was taken as a campaign speech, since he will vote for an imperfect candidate but thinks that as HE is imperfect he should not be a candidate, but why wouldn't he be to others?

He even cops to, as Bellini accused, having thought of a papal name. The script even says:

He takes the Pope's "you're a manager" comment to heart as a bad thing, but is it? The farm does need a manager, in fact the Holy Father IS an Administrator. The fact that it is a Church doesn't really change that. And like Lawrence *is* a good admin/manager, he steers the Conclave, he is a solid candidate, he gets people, he keeps his morals...

It's just. Normally hypocrite characters are that way because they are blind, willfully or not, to their flaws. Lawrence is the rare one that is a hypocrite because he is *all too aware* of his own flaws, even if he can see how they might be an asset in others, because of or despite.

miscmeanderings

I saw some posts talking about how it was narratively obvious Benitez would be pope but I really dismissed it around Act 2 because of how compelling Lawrence's arc was. Exactly the things that OP talks about! The doubt that keeps him humble and penitent, the fluctuating between keeping and breaking rules, the gossiping yet not wanting to gossip. He is a man perpetually torn between naive virtue and necessary vice and through it all in service of a higher ideal and a damn fine circus ringleader to boot. And to me the moment he admits he has thought of his name is, yes, an admission of pride but it is also a cathartic moment of honesty (virtue!) and acceptance of a new, possibly god-ordanined responsibility. What I am lord but a tool to do your bidding. Him becoming Pope felt like the natural climax of his story and the tensions between earthly temple and divine inspiration that the whole movie had fought with. Here is a man who wrestles with one and earnestly seeks (albeit not successfully he feels) the other. Who better to be Pope?!?

And then of course it turns out there is one better, one who has lived that tension as deeply, but, perhaps unlike Lawrence, turned the focus of their pain to service of the least and the most lost in the hardest of places. Someone who has loved deeper and more selflessly than Lawrence is able even though perhaps they may lack other... administrative skills.

It does raise an interesting question about what matters most is a pope's skill or their heart. The answer (perhaps) in the Christian faith is the heart of course, because it is the heart that will turn to God and ultimately he will provide the skills (or skilled people) you need. But of course God can sometimes change he heart in the man with the skills so who can tell?

Either way the ending was, for me, a surprise and yet deeply satisfying. It also doesn't obviate Lawrence's arc because I think he found a degree of hope in and for the church in his journey that he had lost. I think, he got to hear the small still voice of God/see his hand at work in the course of the Conclave and for him that was a great redemption. Becoming Pope or not was really... Secondary.