Conclave (2024) is a better Mean Girls Remake than the Mean Girls Remake

After the death of Pope Francis, I suddenly became intrigued by the movie Conclave. I had seen it featured in the Oscars, but honestly, the Oscars barely give you any impression of what the nominated movies are even about. All I knew was it was a gothic-looking movie about priests.

But oh-ho? I kept seeing posts of people comparing this serious-looking movie to Mean Girls and RuPaul's Drag Race, of all things. ‘How can this be true?’ I asked, scratching my ill-informed head. From an outside view, the movie looked stuffy and pretentious, like most Oscar nominees. Not a total diva-fest. I had to put it to the test.

And I was OBSESSED!

My Conclave hyperfixation got so bad that I was looking it up on Tumblr and actually read the book the movie was adapted from (surprisingly faithful adaptation, by the way). I usually am not into movies like this, but I really enjoyed how the movie used microtension between these characters instead of grand moments, leading to a slow buildup. I began to understand why people compared Conclave to a campy, lower-budget movie like Mean Girls, which I will illuminate in the article. Come on, guys, let's Con this Clave!

(That sounded better in my head.)

1. Both films are about stylish divas asserting dominance.

Okay, I know what you're thinking. ‘Shiren, how could Mean Girls, a movie about high school girls, have as complex internal politics as the Conclave?’

You'd be surprised.

Mean Girls outlines all the nuances of power in female friendship circles, particularly when one has to navigate the waves of high school. I've actually seen it compared to the process of taking down an authoritarian dictator from the inside. Similar to Conclave, the characters in Mean Girls have to engage in complex psychological warfare to take down their foes. Cady and Janice, the Cardinals Lawrence and Bellini to Regina's Cardinal Tedesco, must engage in sneaky tactics to systematically lower Regina's social capital, whether that's by cutting booby holes into her shirt or making her gain weight (which in the 2000s was considered a fate worse than death).

Similarly, Conclave has a lot of the cattiness that made Mean Girls shine, albeit in a more subtle way. I raised my eyebrows early in the movie when I caught onto the subtext of one of Cardinal Adeyemi's comments insinuating that the other cardinals were old farts, and I almost thought I was reading too much into it until the book confirmed my interpretation. The girls (cardinals) are fighting! I also loved when Bellini was being all demure and telling Lawrence, ‘Oh little old me? No, I couldn’t possibly be Pope!' Only to turn around when he starts losing and say ‘Of course I want to be Pope, are you fucking dumb?’ (Albeit in more holy terms, of course) Lawrence and his buddy Ray are constantly spilling tea about the other cardinals in the running, as much as Lawrence wants to pretend he isn't a total gossip fiend. And of course, we can't forget about the ultimate c*nty move of Cardinal Benitez naming himself, ‘Pope Innocent’ with a knowing smirk after all the drama and corruption among the other cardinals. He knows he ain't had anything to do with it. Slay!

2. Corruption and the Burn Book

Over the course of Conclave, a long thread of corruption is unravelled, as it's implied that the late Pope had done some scheming before his death to make sure his cardinal opps, Cardinals Tremblay and Adeyemi, are unable to win the Vatican's Pope Race. Lawrence, discovering evidence of Tremblay's crimes, decides to make a hella large amount of photocopies of the evidence, and leave them out at the lunch tables for all the cardinals to squeal about. Hmm, this reminds me of something…

Oh yeah.

In Mean Girls, Cady and Janice eventually succeed at knocking Regina off her throne. But like any good authoritarian, Regina George will not be defeated without dragging everyone down with her. The Burn Book is an accumulation of all the gossip, drama, and hatred between the female student body, and by distributing its pages, Regina is turning everyone against each other. Like how Lawrence is exposing the financial corruption of the cardinals within the church, Regina is exposing the internalized misogyny-fueled corruption within her own school. While Lawrence certainly has nobler intentions, he does use this evidence to take down a candidate he didn't like.

Tedesco even hits his vape after Adeyemi calls Tremblay ‘Judas’, and I don't know if there's anything more high school than that!

3. Out of the darkness, a diamond shines.

But most of all, Conclave and Mean Girls are about outsiders who, at first, attempt to conform to the status quo before changing it completely.

Cady was an outsider to the school since she had been homeschooled her whole life and was raised in Africa (they never mention which of the 54 countries it was, but I digress). Sucked into Janice's plan of infiltrating the Plastics, she finds she becomes someone she's not in the process; Cady has become a mean girl. Once Cady has had enough of pretending to be a Plastic and realizes that by trying to take them down, she was feeding into the toxic mean girl culture at the school instead of challenging it. She starts doing things that she's actually good at, like being an athlete, even if people call her a nerd.

At homecoming, when she wins Homecoming Queen, instead of conforming to the mean girl culture or using it to serve her own ends, she radically destroys it. This is symbolized by her breaking the plastic crown that symbolizes female power, and throwing it out to her fellow girls, even the plastics. Cady does not take down the system using toxicity and selfishness, but by spreading feminine positivity and love. And in the epilogue, we see the Plastics actually using their skills for good instead of hyperfocusing on beauty, boys, and popularity.

Similarly, in Conclave, Cardinal Benitez is an outsider to the scheming, power-hungry world of the conclave. Unlike most of the cardinals who serve in predominantly Christian nations, Benitez serves in Kabul, Afghanistan, a predominantly Muslim region that has suffered greatly due to conflict. Even before that, he had served in other war-torn nations. None of the cardinals even knew about him because apparently the Pope made him a cardinal in secret? (Yeah, apparently that's just something the Pope can do. Apparently he could make you a cardinal and not even tell you. Hell, I could be a cardinal! Probably not, because I'm…female…and not Catholic, but you get the point).

Benitez seems esoteric because, unlike the other cardinals, he seems not to care much for the politics of it all. He even votes for Lawrence multiple times despite Lawrence literally screaming at him just because he thought Lawrence was a cool dude. Unlike Bellini, he's unwilling to compromise his progressive values just to get a candidate he sees as a lesser evil in power. When Tedesco incites some Islamophobic bs about the terrorist attack at the end of the movie, Benitez chooses that moment to publicly speak out, citing acceptance of both Christians and non-Christians alike in the areas he serves, and how he sees God in all of them. Subsequently, after that, he sweeps the conclave and is given the title of pope for his pure values that are unmarred by power or corruption.

But Benitez has another secret that makes him an outsider. Lawrence later finds out that Benitez is intersex, and while he outwardly presents as male and identifies as a man, he has ovaries. Lawrence is unsure what to do about this, as it is unprecedented for anyone who is not male in the traditional sense to be pope. But in a statement of radical self-love, Benitez reveals he refused to do the surgery to remove his ovaries because he believes God made him the way he is, and that it would be a sin to believe otherwise. In a political landscape where trans and intersex people are attacked relentlessly, Benitez's self-acceptance is a radical challenge to the status quo.

So, while I can't say Conclave is a one to one adaptation of Mean Girls just yet, I think both movies are a wonderful exploration of power, love, and bitchiness.