The best advice I got in college was how to pretend to have read books. Here is a lesson, says the professor in my memory, her clipped, lightly Germanic English twirling around and through comma clauses and parentheticals with pushy grace: If (and when) you are asked, in polite company or otherwise, there are simply certain books you must pretend to have read, even if you have not already read them. Here she pauses theatrically, a natural deliverer of lecture and conjecture. Taking a long drag from the Strawberry Propel in front of her, she concludes, The key, of course, is that then you must read them.
The book that prompted such a dispensation was, not incidentally, the Bible. We were told to pretend we’d read—and therefore charged eventually to read—the Bible not out of any existent evangelizing urge, but because the literature which was the occasion for our study was in large part written by people who’d also read the Bible. How could we commingle Huck Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” with Mark Twain’s own bombed-out faith without considering the frame that created both Huck’s imperfect grace as well as his author’s damned rendering of it? A bible is a book of short stories as much as any other. “In my nightmares,” Twain wrote in his autobiography, “I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night.”
I like this suggestion of aspirational lying. I still haven’t read that big good book in its entirety, just as I haven’t read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, the novelistic basis for the erstwhile subject of this essay, The Name of the Rose (1986). That adaptation, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, calls itself in its own opening credits “a palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel”—a provocative, generative, and not altogether unpretentious appellation to lay claim to. Fittingly, Eco’s semiotic murder mystery set in a 14th century abbey is not altogether unconcerned with the variable worth of pretentiousness, within and outside of belief systems. It features for its hero the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, a monk whose moniker reaches as much to Conan Doyle as it does William of Occam, half detective of deduction, half monk philosopher. In the framing of Annaud’s film—here you must remember that I have not read Eco’s novel, though ask me and I will confess I find it immaculately thrilling, a pulp divined from perjured dogma and literature alike—William’s novice Adso recounts in retrospect, via offscreen voiceover, the story from a future we never quite glimpse. “I pray always that God received his soul,” the old Adso says of his mentor William, “and forgave the many little vanities to which he was driven by his intellectual pride.” The Name of the Rose isn’t not about defending our pretensions: in the face of bad faith, some objects of art and philosophy—indeed, some books—warrant fighting for.
In the present of The Name of the Rose, William (Sean Connery) and Adso (Christian Slater) arrive at a Benedictine abbey somewhere in Northern Italy, nominally as representatives of a forthcoming papal debate on piety and poverty and situationally as robed Holmes and Watson investigating the death of a Benedictine illuminator. Ruled a suicide but too fogged by suspicious circumstance—how could the illuminator’s body have fallen from the highest library tower window and wound up where it did unless it were pushed?—William suspects both foul play and a serialization of murders to follow. Annaud imbues his medieval realm not with the promise of swords and sorcery but the lowest cosmic dread. This is a world shot by Tonino Delli Colli who, in the twelve films he made with Pasolini, did more to bury the sublime inside the damned inside a film frame than any contemporary European cinematographer. Like The Name of the Rose, many of those films were literary adaptations of keystone medieval texts: of the Gospels and Chaucer, of Boccaccio and The Arabian Nights. To render them is to see doom and salvation not as opposites but conversants. In preparing long stone hallways whose ends remain hidden and pitch-blacked corners of every film frame, Annaud and Delli Colli prepare their story for death. Bodies become subject to blotting as corpses of formerly holy men surface in bathtubs and blood basins, fingers and tongues made mysteriously black as if they’d touched something tainted, as if uttering some forbidden language took away their breath. The killer is coming from inside the abbey.
The Name of the Rose looks bad—as in, it looks like a world abandoned by grace: poor people gather at the sluice gates for literal garbage while gaudy, gouty papal delegates extol how Christ (and not the church or its officiants) should be poor. Berger’s Conclave (2024) posed a similar bureaucratic dare, begging what the management of God’s business would look like in a God-less world. The answer there was clinical and perfunctory, a greyed-out world managed by good and bad faith men alike. Conclave casts as its conspirators sharp men with soft edges, embezzlers, schemers, idealogues mostly committed to pragmatism. As a portrait of a community in crisis, it’s not unlike Hollywood itself, that domain counseled by movie-star faces who consider doom and pragmatism and settle, mainly, for the middle road between both. There are few such movie star faces in The Name of the Rose. There are, instead, a cabal of the weirdest grotesques world cinema had to offer circa 1986, a menagerie of cabaret artists (Helmut Qualtinger), Bond villains (Michael Lonsdale), silent film journeymen (Feodor Chaliapin Jr.), the German dub for Oliver Hardy and Danny DeVito (Michael Habeck), and Uncle Lewis from Christmas Vacation (William Hickey). Everyone’s skin resembles eggs cooking on a cast iron, everyone’s haircut like a boiled parrot.
There are some vestiges of the Dream Factory at work in this strange wilderness. Sean Connery, mid-career slump and still a year away from revival via De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), was tapped to play William of Baskerville, a move that, according to Annaud’s DVD commentary, sent Columbia execs hiking and Eco into a depressive spiral. As William, Connery reads not as erudite so much as blundering, a modulation in line with Connery’s weird and frankly singular charisma. He does not present as capable but instead confident despite his incapabilities, a tendency that touched the erotic earlier in Connery’s career and here feels like zen touched with zany, more Zardozy than Bonded, arresting in a tonsure. Connery smiles away this brutal world like Johnny Knoxville approaching the bull. F. Murray Abraham’s Bernardo Gui doesn’t enter until the film’s third act, when Abraham bursts in playing him like a television inquisitor, maybe wearing custom contacts to give himself a divinely thousand-yard stare and speaking in a voice pitched somewhere between Transatlantic and Harold Hill. Gui is meant as a foil to William, brandishing hasty accusations rather than logic and instruments of torture instead of books. Curiously, the Inquisition is treated as incidental in Annaud’s palimpsest. It is neither a metaphoric stand-in for a society choosing cruelty over knowledge nor is it narratively the source of the film’s mystery solution or angst. In 2011, Eco said of his novel, “A book like this is a club sandwich, with turkey, salami, tomato, cheese, lettuce. And the movie is obliged to choose only the lettuce or the cheese, eliminating everything else—the theological side, the political side. It’s a nice movie.” With respect to Eco, it’s precisely in the way Annaud and his collaborators turn the Inquisition and Catholicism into pure image—everything is mise en scène in The Name of the Rose—that they implicate the conditions that create the theological and political, rather than react in representative terms to their “real world” alternatives.
For instance: the voice Annaud casts for the older Adso narrating the film is Dwight Weist Jr.’s, dubbed “the man of a 1000 voices” for his work on The March of Time, an American newsreel that ran from 1935 to 1951. A quasi-documentary/dramatization, Time cast several actors to ‘play’ its historical figures, and Weist was among the most prolific—he voiced FDR as well as Hitler, and won raves in an August 1935 edition of the Scranton Tribune for his vocal adjustment made after Hitler himself underwent surgery to make his speaking voice smoother. As with Chaplin’s own attempts to belittle the monstrous in imitation, Hitler might have seemed like a glitch of history, not an inflection point. By 1986, Weist and Annaud knew all too well, and so a weird historical judder haunts their film. A voice, like a palimpsest, contains previous versions of itself, and remembering is as much cause for art as it is terror.
The Name of the Rose is about an old man and a young man remembered by an old man who was the young man. Played by a mostly unknown Christian Slater, Adso is something of an audience surrogate and something of a damsel in spiritual distress. By the film’s end, he abandons the monastic life, choosing not to leave with William but remain behind, as seduced by an earlier bout of barn sex with a girl from the village as he is wearied by a movie full of men invoking Christ to satisfy their own perverse stabs at power and the flesh. William just walks on, twice as weary but balanced in the precise space between faith in better angels and logic over faith’s limitations. With a novice and a mentor, The Name of the Rose reduces William and Adso to types so that it may wonder—through colliding these typographic figures into other symbols—about the distance between knowledge and wisdom. The film bisects these ideals with a frankly refreshing dose of dirty-knee eros, even as the framing for its remembering is humanity’s seemingly endless capacity to torture itself in Inquisitions and a real scorn for the poorest among us.
It is these conditions that make The Name of the Rose instructive and pleasurable viewing in the strange woggle space between 2025 and 2026. It is a period piece that does not cannibalize the context of its setting to make cheap polemical observations, opting instead for genre fiction’s agility and palpability of feeling. Simultaneously, it embodies a speculative past-future where tyranny pools in a wilderness abbey only to create something worse than the Antichrist, which is to say the conditions wherein humans perpetrate anti-Christly actions. This strain of sober-minded, genre-borne observation presents differently in our addled contemporary culture. It is perhaps hard to imagine avoiding comparisons to Wake Up Dead Man (2025), not because that film is especially insightful or even especially good, but because it was made by streaming services to intrude upon cultural conversations, to convert questions (over faith and form, about how we are to proceed forward) into answers (equalize logic and faith, spin platitudes about doing your best each day).
Mysteries come in two chief varieties: those that provide the conditions for their own solving—we might call these ‘true’ mysteries—and those that present a central mystery without supplying the actual puzzle pieces or logic necessary for a spectator to use. The former category, it would seem to me, suggests something about the design of a universe, namely that with enough attention and analysis, patterns emerge. Chaos is randomized when suspects look more like Jeremy Renner or Glenn Close than men pockmarked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and when solutions don’t involve getting up and leaving. More or less, there is a plan at work in this language—there is an answer. This is the mode favored by authors like Rian Johnson, who see in this cleverness-forward puzzle logic the means of justifying the current order of things; a good priest, like a good detective, might remedy systems that are merely in need of tending, rather than immolation. In Dead Man, the temptation to sin is literally hidden away in a refurbished symbol of faith in the medium, incidentally using mysteries of faith to justify signing a Netflix contract in the first place.
In Annaud’s The Name of the Rose—a palimpsest of faith—one man chooses theoretical love and another chooses theoretical God, no matter the hell on earth they’ve witnessed. The mark of design is notably absent. Mysterious inclinations and suspicions still occur, as in Johnson’s ‘true’ mysteries, but devoid of set containers. To express faith is to challenge it, whether in something like ‘God’ or something like ‘humanity.’ I have no prejudice against calculated faith. But a leap made devoid of data, perpetrated not in spite of the chaos but because of it, seems to me the beam that balances our most essential truths—love and lust, melody and noise, liberation and attention.