Being seen
On Cardinals watching Conclave, Mafiosi watching the Sopranos, livestreaming self-immolation, and poets shooting politicians.
Note: there’s discussion of violence and suicide in this post.
I lately – perhaps for the obvious reasons – have been thinking a lot about accounts of various Cardinals watching the movie Conclave ahead of their own experience of it. Apparently, the new Pope’s brother recommended he watch it, “so he knew how to behave.”
The fidelity of films is normally something interrogated by their subjects real-life antecedents – even becoming a silly format for YouTube content: “Convicted gangster reacts to opening scene of The Godfather.” It’s a curious suggestion that a fictionalised depiction might provide guidance for a high-pressure situation. But where else can we turn for instruction? Baudrillard once remarked his bemusement at car crash victims recounting their experience as being “just like a movie.”
Representation in film is often a euphemism for issues of gender, racial, and other injustices – telling untold stories; untold by whom? But this is a different question entirely: a vanishingly small number of people will ever live a life in a religious organisation. Fewer still will climb its ranks, ascending to the top, going behind the sealed doors of the Vatican. It’s political intrigue that predates the left-right paradigm: a nation-state led by a disparate group of men from around the world, divided by language, geography and doctrine. Conclave provides adherents, participants and casual observers a glimpse into an experience lived by very few.
People are happy to have their story told. FBI investigators found that contemporary mafia members and wannabes adored The Sopranos, a show which itself mocked its characters’ love of The Godfather. In the show and in real-life wiretaps, the gangsters were heard quoting lines at length, savouring the recognition that their lives had drawn. The sense of being a character lends agency and meaning to a person’s life. Stories have an arc; they go somewhere – and when executed well, are worth watching, and by approximation, are worth living.
It would make sense for the opposite to be true: that living your life to a previously written script would be claustrophobic, the very opposite of being alive. Drama and intensity generate feeling.
Public acts of violence – to yourself, others or both – borrow from a similar lexicon. TV and film depictions of serial killers, mass shooters and others often show the malicious thrill perpetrators take from the seriousness of the attention they receive, from doctors attempting to profile their psychology or journalists trying to write up their story. They relish being the villain, just like in the movies.
In an episode of SVU, the criminal psychologist played by actor BD Wong recommends the officer “appeal to his narcissism” to elicit a confession. In another show, the name of which partially escapes my memory now, the investigator chides the suspect: “Your fifteen minutes of fame is over; you’ll rot in a cell for the rest of your life. No one will remember you.”
I found myself watching less and less news around the time Aaron Bushnell died, a 25-year-old US soldier who set himself on fire to protest the war in Gaza. He livestreamed his self-immolation on Twitch, shouting “Free Palestine.” My pangs of sympathy with Bushnell, and later Luigi Mangione, were uncomfortable, troubling. I couldn’t give over any more mental or emotional space to everything that was happening, and held increasingly less faith in what following current affairs actually achieved. Debates about what the acts of Bushnell and Mangione meant often centred on the idea of the copycat – that in giving their actions a narrative meaning, others would be compelled to follow. Narrative has its own gravitational pull.
In a recent review of Helen Garner’s collected diaries, Anne Enright recounts the story of an Australian poet who shot a politician point-blank, explaining they did it to set themselves apart “from all the other, you know, nobodies,”
Enright’s writing about Garner traces a familiar note of feminist historiography. Despite her subject’s literary successes, she’s eclipsed from an influential anthology that skews overwhelmingly male. Gender is not the only dynamic at play here, but class too. ‘Garner wrote Monkey Grip as a sacked single mother living on welfare, scraping together cash by writing magazine articles,’ Enright explains.
Being a nobody is the other side of being seen – perhaps what is at stake is self worth. Celebrities have often described the attention of the crowd as warm, like the embrace of another person, comforting. Identity is validated through others, especially those who are strangers – our loved ones might lie to us, or lie to themselves, because they love us. ‘I am crude, a beginner,’ Garner wrote in her diaries at the time of her exclusion. ‘People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford book.’