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5. GIBSON'S THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: FROM MY OWN PERSPECTIVE (March 2004)
"Did you enjoy the movie, sir?" the young cleaning girl asked nicely, sweeping
popcorn off the floor.
The lights were up and I
was the last person left in the theater. I'd finally stood, was zipping up my
coat, and still decompressing.
I had to think a moment.
"...Not
enjoyable..exactly. But it's a tremendous film."
Not what I expected.
Which is why my
confidently pre-chosen title doesn't appear above: GIBSON'S THE
PASSION OF THE CHRIST: GOD DIDN'T DIE, THE JEWS DIDN'T KILL HIM, AND THE
MOVIE IS UNBELIEVABLY BAD.
I can tell you that this
Jewish atheist watched some of this film with tears in his eyes. Though the
tears come from somewhere else than those of a believing Christian, and when I
explain where they come from, believer, you won't be pleased. All the charges
against the film didn't hold up in the viewing: Yes, the Jews howling for
Christ's death were a pack of human hyenas, but they were balanced by
sympathetic Jews. And, if I can be a little flip, even the range of nose types
was wider than I'd expected-- not everyone was a hook-nosed caricature. I didn't
find the film anti-Semitic, though it won't make non-Jews love us, either. The
savage Romans were balanced by less savage ones, even good ones. The violence is
hard, but watchable-- it really doesn't go beyond movie violence. The actual
effect of sword, knife, spear or the lash on human flesh has never been fully
shown in any mainstream film, and can't be. We'll look away rather than accept
what happens to human bodies at the worst. Christ's wounds here remain movie
wounds, make-up wounds, though harsh of their type. The movie is watchable--
don't believe the reviews. The charge is also made that the violence is
unrelieved, monotonous. Not so. The film moves through different stages, each
with its particular violence and violators. Some have said the film is
homoerotic, as male after male assaults a sometimes scantily-clad Christ, but
that's sick. The only ones who could take any pleasure in these scourgings are
sadists, gay or straight. If anything, the movie goes in the other direction,
dipping into homophobia, with the campy King Herod and his decadent court--
imagine an over-the-top gay John Belushi-- and snakily androgynous Satan. As if
gay stands for evil. (As in the way American action films often cast an epicene
Englishman as the villain.)
It is not an original
film, though an extraordinarily intense and heartfelt one. Gibson has no new
"take" on Christ, and looks with contempt on the idea. The cult of originality
belongs to modernity, and this film is premodern. Received wisdom and canonized
detail are welcome and accepted, even if they're products of a time after
Christ. Hence, again Jesus is tall, blue-eyed, long-haired and pleasing to
behold-- it "fits the role", even though the average Jew of his time was about
5-3 and 110 lbs., dark-haired and dark-eyed, skin tan or olive. And Jews wore
their hair short. (Their curly, even kinky, hair couldn't grow long and lanky,
anyway.) Nail pounds through palm, though the few remains of crucifixion victims
show or indicate nails through forearms. But that is the classic iconography.
(The Gospels don't even mention nails-- they just say Jesus was crucified.) We
know the historical Pontius Pilate as a cruel brute who crucified many without
trial, but Gibson is comfortable with the Bible's Pilate, a thoughtful man
reluctantly giving in to the screams of Jewish priests (who historically were
actually conciliators, working against extremists and violence). In truth, it's
the Romans who may have been mostly, even entirely, responsible for Christ's
condemnation. But the Gospels reflect the growing anti-Jewishness of those new
and self-consciously "Christian". Gibson simply picks up a 1,900-year-old
football and runs with it. Mary Magdalene is a harlot-- can't you tell from the
earrings? And the Ultimate Convention is presented as simple fact, so
taken-for-granted by Gibson that it has the feel of an afterthought in the
film-- the Resurrection.
Now, some of the movie
isn't "received"-- it's Gibson inventing. Satan works his way through the
film, observing, subverting, but ultimately defeated. The Jewish High Priests
attend the crucifixion-- Gibson makes that up. Dialogue is added for Pilate and
his wife. Mary and Mary Magdalene are both beauties. Who knows, but not likely.
The extended scenes of whipping by the Romans are created from a few Gospel
words. These additions don't bother me. Christianity is 2,000 years of
imagining, of build-your-own. From the 1st Century on the story of Christ has
been an open call to fill-in-the-blanks. The four Gospels are thought to date
from around 70 to 110 AD, and they contradict each other. (The earliest
manuscripts of Mark don't even have a resurrection.) At best, they were
written by eyewitnesses decades or generations later, and written not as
history-- as, say, a Thucydides or Tacitus would write-- but as religious
propaganda. At worst, the writers weren't eyewitnesses, but heard the story from
others. And then their Gospels went through the Church's Gospel-winnowing
process, which dismissed scores of other Gospels, canonized four-- and engaged
in some rewrites and additions. (Please remember, that while the Gospels may
have been written in the late 1st or early 2nd Centuries, the earliest surviving
Gospel manuscript is the Rylands Papyrus [just a bit of John], from about
130-140 AD, and the earliest complete New Testament manuscripts-- the Codex
Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus -- date from a little over three centuries after
the crucifixion. Imagine that the earliest complete biography of George
Washington was dated 2104, with nothing earlier than a few 20th Century
fragments. And presented him as divine.)
There is no evidence that
Jesus intended to found a Church, or establish a religion called "Christianity".
That is the invention of others, after, especially Paul. Really, it is the
invention of human hunger for transcendence, especially from death. In his book
Jesus, Humphrey Carpenter says "Jesus's moral teaching (as we have it)
does not in itself explain the degree of attention he attracted. We simply do
not find in it sufficient reason for his being put to death, and for a new
religion to grow up around his person." So the ultimate energy of the new
religion would be the power of its God, worship of a superbeing for being super.
As Paul put it so honestly: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching
vain, and your faith is also vain." (I Corinthians 15.14) That's
the King James translation. The New English Bible, 2nd Edition, is even
harsher: "...if Christ is not raised, then our Gospel is null and void." Giving
the Teacher godliness, the teaching can then come along for the ride. This kind
of superpower can't be portrayed on film, it is unconvincing, and is so here.
What's left seems mortal to my eyes, and that's how it reaches me emotionally.
The film could just as well have been titled: Ecce Homo.
Behold The Man. What I felt watching this film was the direct opposite of what a
believer feels: sadness and pity for how humans suffer. Against all his beliefs,
Gibson makes Christ one of us, soft mortal fruit. I had tears when Mary reaches
him on the way to Golgotha and says "I'm here", as she does (in a flashback) to
her child Jesus when he falls. And now he's a young man who thinks or
half-thinks (it's unclear even in the Gospels) that he's divine or connected to
divinity and as a result will learn a horrible lesson in his mortality and
weakness, and his mother will have to watch it helplessly to the end, as mothers
have watched their sons through all time. Christ's most powerful and pitiable
and (if he's a God) incomprehensible utterance is "Eli, Eli, lama asavtani" (in
the Aramaic), "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Here is the desperate
human chick breaking through the divine shell with one last cry.
A Gibson would say I
don't get it, that if I see this as the sad story of a man I miss the essence.
But he can't do anything to convince me, just impress me. This film is made in
proud defiance of the way the world goes-- and that is heroic-- but the world
goes on its way. The bulk of the human race has made its final judgment on
Christianity, its fundamental incoherence and unbelievability, its
nonintegration of man and God. It is why Christianity has so little presence in
the great civilizations of China, Japan and India, why Europe a century or two
hence will be Islamic, why America is increasingly secular. Indeed, Christianity
today is at the stage where the classical paganism was in the 200's AD, still
with its temples and priests and services and politicians publicly professing it
and art in its behalf. I feel Gibson is gripping us by the neck and shouting "
See!? See!? See what Jesus suffered!? I'll show it to you with such reality and
power that you'll--"
What?
Indeed, this is a great
movie. But it's nothing more. He made the classic mistake of the artist,
believing he could trump life if he could just get every detail right. But in
fact, there is only one detail, and art has no command over it.
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