The Status of the Classical Authority in Modern Mass Culture: the Case of Paolo Sorrentino’s Series «The Young Pope» and «The New Pope»

The academic paper is dedicated to the theme of the status of the classical authority in the current sociocultural process. Today, allusions to traditional plots and images, originating from art, literature, mythology and history of the church, are often reinterpreted in the products of mass culture and used in advertising, memes, music videos and cinema. The empirical basis of the study, the series of P. Sorrentino “Young Pope” (2016) and “New Pope” (2020), serves as an illustrative example of common strategies of working with tradition in the current cultural situation. The objective of the research is to determine how classical symbols of traditional culture are built into the frame of modernity. In order to reach this objective we managed to define the concept of the "classical authority" and determine how the idea of it changed during different periods of cultural history; to reveal the main features of mass culture and their impact on the perception of the classics; to discover common approaches to the authoritative plots in the postmodern era and methods of their recontextualization; to study the semantics of cultural allusions based on the empirical base; to conduct a series of interviews with experts in the field. The stated hypothesis of the study has been confirmed. The findings of our study might be useful for the authors aspiring to produce a commercially and aesthetically successful mass culture product, filled with allusions to the classical authority.