“Revelations in Plaid:
The Trouble with Angels and the Post-Conciliar Imagination”
An Interview with Professor Chester Featherstone
Journalist’s Reportage from the Summer Film Conference at Castel Gandolfo
By the time I reached the sun-dappled gardens of Castel Gandolfo, the ancient papal summer residence that has drawn popes and pilgrims for centuries, it was clear this was no ordinary film studies conference. Fragrant Italian pines framed the terraced walkways where scholars gathered to debate cinema’s place in sacred history — and at the center of the swirl was Professor Chester Featherstone of the University of New Hampshire, a man whose interpretive zeal makes Dan Brown’s academics look like careful librarians.
I met him outside the Palazzo’s café, where he was gesturing emphatically toward Lake Albano below.
“You see,” he began, eyes shining, “The Trouble with Angels is not teen fluff. It’s a semiotic palimpsest of Vatican II, Kennedy’s Catholic presidency, and the soul of post-war Catholicism itself.”
Most critics have pigeonholed the 1966 Columbia Pictures comedy as a lighthearted adolescent romp about rebellious girls and kindly nuns — a “pleasant” film easily filed under childhood nostalgia. But Featherstone, beneath his sheep-skin academic tweed, has dug deeper. Way deeper.
Uncovering the Narrative Arc and Geopolitical Roots
“The film’s narrative arc,” he insisted, “mirrors the ecclesial tension of the early 1960s — institution and reform interlocking in dialogical motion.” Vatican II’s call for aggiornamento — bringing the Church up to date — he argues, is encoded in the interplay between the disciplined Mother Superior and the energetic, questioning schoolgirls.
He pointed out that Mother Superior’s authority evolves significantly across the film, not in a trivial way, but in a way that echoes the shift from pre-conciliar juridical authority to a more pastoral, dialogical model. For Featherstone, the school’s convent setting is a micro-Church in negotiation with its own metamorphosis.
And then — as if that were not enough — there was the Kennedy factor. The professor drew a line between the film’s representation of youth asserting agency within a venerable institution and the ambivalent legitimacy of John F. Kennedy’s Catholic presidency. In his telling, the film silently dramatizes the reconciliation of Catholic identity with modern civic life, a theme central to Kennedy’s own theological and political biography.
But this is where Professor Featherstone’s interpretive compass truly pointed off-map.
Screenwriter Langdon: The Mystery Man
“I haven’t yet published this,” he said with a conspiratorial glance, lowering his voice — “but the screenwriter, Edmund R. Langdon, is an enigmatic figure. He appears, briefly, in Hollywood records, and then… gone. Yet I have uncovered connections — to lay Catholic intellectual circles in Rome just before Vatican II, and beyond them, hints of ties to far more arcane networks.” There was a pause. Then: “Patterns, my friend. Patterns that suggest something broader.”
If the invocation of Opus Dei -- and the whispered suggestions of Illuminati affiliation - sounds like the stuff of The Da Vinci Code, that, too, is precisely the effect Featherstone seems to court. He is quick to clarify that these connections are preliminary, yet insists they point to a hidden architecture of influence inexplicably tied up with mid-century Catholic cultural production.
Over espressos in the garden, surrounded by roses that have shaded popes and princes alike, he unfolded a diagram: triangles embedded in the film’s blocking patterns; the recurrence of tripartite narrative motifs; labyrinthine corridors suggesting mystical geometry — all hinting, he whispered, at esoteric shaping forces beyond the surface narrative.
Is it serious scholarship? Without question — in Featherstone’s meticulous style. Is it wild? Also, emphatically yes.
And yet — therein lies its charm.
Semiotics of Mid-1960s Teen Cinema
Because what Featherstone’s work makes clear is this: the layers of The Trouble with Angels can be read not just as cinematic storytelling but as a cultural node where ecclesiology, political identity, and symbolic structures collide.
When I asked him why a Disney comedy should matter to serious Catholic cinema studies, he answered matter-of-factly:
“Because beneath its playful surface lies the negotiation of institutional authority, devotional identity, and the tension between tradition and reform. A film like this teaches us how Catholicism was experiencing itself on the cusp of transformation.”
The professor never quite explained what the Illuminati references mean — only that he will have much more to say in his next article, perhaps at the next conference.
But as I walked back through the gardens of Castel Gandolfo — the very retreat that has hosted popes for over four centuries — I realized I had witnessed something rare: not just an argument about a film, but a theological interpretation of popular culture that insists on finding depth everywhere it looks, even in a teen level puff piece widely thought of as innocuous.
Professor Featherstone, amidst papal balconies and Renaissance stonework, has shown that every text can be a cipher, if one is willing to read it with equal parts seriousness, fascination — and unabashed imagination.
