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Flailing Mel - Timothy Don
If there is one lesson to
be learned from The Passion of the Christ, for those among us who look to $30 million
movies for insights, it is not a lesson about Gospel Truth or Anti-Semitism
or Sado-Masochism, or any of the other big-ticket items that both supporters
and antagonists of the film have seemed desperate and determined to harvest
with their sharp little scything minds. It is a small and an obvious lesson, one that I am surprised
to have to recall in my own defense of the film, and it has to do with
interpretation. Interpretations of controversial cultural phenomena often
reveal more about the interpreter—her concerns and her cultural agenda—than
they do about the phenomena being interpreted. This is understandable,
because ideas have consequences and the stakes are high. But it is also
a pity, because the net result is often a retreat from dialogue and debate
into an ideological bunker or to a moral high ground that offers nothing
more than a vantage point for shelling one’s enemies, real or perceived,
with a vehemence that obscures the phenomenon itself and obliterates the
tragic elements at its core. So it is with The Passion of the Christ:
the savagery portrayed in the film is echoed by the savaging it has received
at the hands of its critics, and the tragedy it attempts to enact has
been chewed into offal between the chatter of our self-righteous Arbiters
of Taste and the clamouring Guardians of Liberal Values.
The responses
to the film, for the most part, lead us down twin paths of cultural impoverishment
and vapid tolerance. They tend to be reactions either to the violence
in the film or to its purported anti-Semitic message. Indeed, The Passion
is an overwhelmingly bloody film. Frank Rich describes it as “a joy ride
for sadomasochists…With its laborious build-up to its orgasmic spurtings
of blood and other bodily fluids, Mr. Gibson's film is constructed like
nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding
music for the money shots.” On Hardball,
in an elaboration of his review in Slate Magazine, Christopher Hitchens called it a homoerotic
“exercise in lurid sadomasochism” for those who “like seeing handsome
young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time.” Mr. Hitchens,
never one to shirk an opportunity for a well-turned phrase or a bon mot,
doesn’t tell us who these sadomasochists getting off on the film actually
are or why we would imagine they even matter. What he does give us in
his review is a drawn-out, thoroughly distasteful ad hominem attack of
Mel Gibson, which he ends with his hysterical neo-Hitchens signature:
“A coward, a bully, a bigmouth, and a queer-basher. Yes, we have been
here before. The word is fascism, in case you are wondering, and we don't
have to sit through that movie again.” So Mel Gibson is a fascist, a threat
to liberal societies, according to Mr. Hitchens, and only a freak would
enjoy watching his movie.
The fascism
charge is ludicrous and funny, in my opinion, and it would be endearing
if it weren’t so predictable. It returns me to the heady days of 1980’s
political correctness, when any teacher who had the effrontery to behave
as though her training in and practice of an academic discipline might
actually lend her an authority on its subject matter that would trump
the personal experiences that her students brought to their desks, without
much else in the way of learning, ran the risk of likewise being labeled.
Mel Gibson seems like a pretty unsavory fellow and a bit of a fool and
a Jew-baiter, but he isn’t going to change much in western democracies
or even in Hollywood with his Malibu church and his private studio and
his pre-modern doctrines. He’s an actor, now a director, not the leader
of a cult. The pope does not take his marching orders from Mel.
The charges
in regard to sadomasochism and perversity are more interesting, mostly
as an object lesson in how counter-intuitive (not to say “contrarian”)
thinking is eclipsed by ideology. What Mr. Hitchens misses, as he fires
off one round of ad hominems after another at Mel “straw man” Gibson,
are the implications of his own observations. I agree with him: one would
have to be a freak and probably a fascist to “get off” on the torture
and the brutality, but I have yet to meet a single person who actually
has. What I have met and heard reports of, however, are people who were
unable to watch these parts of the film. The single most prevalent reaction
I have heard from people (people who were not blinded by their own preconceptions)
was that the film was very difficult to watch, not that it was somehow
titillating.
The torture,
Mr. Hitchens, does not play into the hands of the fascists and sadomasochists
you see lurking in every closet across America; its dramatic effect is
precisely to make the viewer turn away—literally, inside the theater—from
the film, and by extension figuratively from the suffering of the Christ.
The blood and pain are not present for the delectation of the viewer,
though Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Rich seem troublingly to linger over their
descriptions of it; the function of the gore is an immediate if unintended
effect on the viewer: one turns away from the horror of Christ’s suffering;
it is unwatchable; it cannot be assimilated—and thus one is implicated
in the rejection of the Christ.
The refusal
to watch, an almost instinctive denial, should be understood as a metaphorical
denial of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice, the first step in his betrayal,
which leads one, upon reflection, to the insight that we were all implicated
in the tragedy of his death. Jews did not kill Christ; every individual
present on that day in Judea did, either by calling for his death or turning
away from him; and we are reminded by this film, if we allow ourselves
to be reminded at all, that had we been there we too would have denied
Christ and taken part in his suffering and death.
This brings
us to the charge of anti-Semitism, which like the sadomasochism/fascism
charge, contains two elements worth examining. The first is the much-discussed
portrayal of “the Jews.” Contrary to what has been written by, among others,
Katha Pollit, the Sanhedrin in the film do not have hooked noses and yellow
or rotting teeth. That is a deliberate fudging of evidence that any interpreter
should be embarrassed to have to commit in order to make her case. The
Sanhedrin appear like nothing so much as modern power brokers, smooth
talking, specious, conspiratorial and glib, who recognise and exploit
an opportunity to consolidate their base in the community, eliminate a
rival, and remind their overlords (the Romans) that in this outpost of
the empire power is multivalent and needs a bit of local cooperation in
order to be effectively administered. The crucifixion is set up by a tenuous
bargain between a military governor and the local bigwigs, who happen
to be Jewish; and it is accomplished by drawing all the parties involved
into its bloody web. Perhaps those literal-minded interpreters who see
in the film guilt being laid firmly at the feet of Jews for the Christ’s
death would have been less uncomfortable if the Sanhedrin had been dressed
as members of the Taliban or the House of Saud?
The second
element of the anti-Semitic charge carries an unsavory whiff of true racism
on its breath. Mr. Hitchens has admitted that “many Jews have decided
to be calm and unoffended by the film, and…many Christians say they don't
feel any worse about Jews after having seen it.” He seems willing to dismiss
the reactions of nut-case churches in America with their cheesy billboards
and cheap sloganeering, but what, he wonders, will be the reaction “in
Egypt and Syria, or in Eastern Europe, where things are a bit more raw”
than they are here? This weak-kneed liberal waffling would be amusing
if weren’t also deeply nefarious and hypocritical, coming from a man who
wants to see the Bush administration confront and transform despotic regimes
in the Mideast.
Do you
mean to suggest, Mr. Hitchens, that democracy could flourish in the Mideast
but that the locals are too backward to appreciate metaphor? That they
could hold elections but that they could not see this movie without charging
into the streets afterward and reenacting the tragedy it portrays? That
they are so stupid that it would be preferable not to show them movies
that touch upon notions of collective guilt and social crime, out of fear
that they would take to be literal truth a story that we in the west have
been telling and reinterpreting for two thousand years?
There is
much in The Passion of the Christ that is not only defensible but also
profound and deeply nuanced. The shot of Judas hanging himself, with the
rotting carcass of a donkey in the foreground and the walls of Jerusalem
in the background, the city of God from which Judas has driven himself,
by his own actions, is a portrait of despair and alienation worthy of
El Greco. It is one of the simplest and most effective moments I have
ever seen on film. Likewise with the pieta Gibson stages at the end of
the film. Mary—the one person who does not at any moment betray the Christ,
who follows him to Golgotha and forces herself to witness his pain throughout—holds
the body of her son across her lap and looks directly through the camera
and into the viewer, bringing to a close for us the tortured cycle of
turning away and turning toward with which we have been wrestling for
the duration of the film. It is an uncanny and transcendent exchange between
the viewer and the viewed.
Gibson
has been excoriated in the press for his ridiculous truth claims regarding
the film, and he should have been. But he has inadvertently made a masterpiece,
in my opinion, because he achieved one thing that until now I did not
think could be represented in artistic interpretations of the Passion.
The most difficult, and (possibly for that reason) the most under-discussed
tenet in Catholic doctrine has to do with the nature of Christ. One cannot
be a Catholic without the understanding that Christ was both fully human
and fully divine. A common mistake—and it is the Greek mistake, committed
most famously by Nikos Kazantzakis in his Last Temptation of Christ then
rearticulated by Martin Scorcese in his adaptation of the book—is to assign
to Christ a dual or divided nature, one part divine and one part human.
You cannot believe, for example, that Christ the man suffered and died
on the cross but Christ the messiah could not (being divine), and still
claim to be a Catholic. This would truly be to make the Passion into a
play, a purely symbolic representation in which God was only an actor
and not a full participant. In Gibson’s film, Christ is without question
fully human: he lived, he suffered and he died on the cross. But he is
also, in the film, shown to be fully divine: there are no lingering questions
as to whether he was actually the messiah who symbolically died or a divinely
inspired man who accepted death as a symbolic sacrifice for the world’s
sin. Fully human, fully divine: Gibson gets this part of Catholic theology,
at least, right. The implications of this are manifold, and they cannot
be summed up with easy formulas Ultimately, the implications have to do
with accepting the dignity and infinite potential of the human person—for
this is what it means to accept not that God walked the earth in the shape
of a man, but that God actually was, fully and completely, a human being.
Pious
Horror - Alan Koenig
Knowing
what gruesome scenes await, one braces oneself to watch Mel Gibson’s The
Passion of the Christ with grim stoicism. It is one of those films that you
hear is intriguing and worthwhile but so disturbing that it requires a
unique and solemn mood before viewing. ‘Tis not for a fun-loving Saturday
night’s distraction. The violence, as intended, is stunning. The audience
watches a gentle, lovely, compassionate man with a softly stubborn adherence
to what seems a trivial eccentricity being tortured to death in precisely
rendered detail. Flesh is flayed and curls back to reveals ribs, blood
flows in rivulets and an arm is dislocated to fit more snugly upon the
cross. The visceral realism of this onslaught lingers long after leaving
the theater.
Attempting to bracket
the gory atrocity so integral to the film allows some of its more “art
house” features to shine briefly before being bloodily eclipsed. The
Passion is well-crafted as cinema, and Gibson’s bold decision
to film it in ancient Aramaic and a Latin dialect bestows an almost Fellini-like
science fiction perspective to the clash between Jews and Romans. Like
Satyricon, the peoples portrayed
are familiar yet anthropologically distant from the modern: fascinating,
colorful and elusive. Unless well acquainted with the Gospels, the gist
of contested authorities to execute Christ, the political machinations
of Roman occupation and the theological import of Christ’s heresy are
obscure and alien. The Sanhedrin’s basic beef with the Jewish apostate
remains mystifying, as does the crowd’s mass sadism when it calls for
his torture and death. It is not only Pilate who is puzzled.
Gibson throws in a few exculpatory priests among the Sanhedrin who want
nothing to do with the “travesty” before them; at least two rabbis express
their moral disgust and angrily stalk away from the raucously brief “trial.”
Roman soldiers respond to the execution with everything from revulsion
bordering on conversion to gleefully sadistic cretinism. Beguiling flashes
of this ancient, volatile society can be caught before the crushing narrative
of crucifixion compresses them to the margins.
The eye wants to wander
about this curious past and elicit more detail and comprehension before
it is forcibly drawn back to the narrow brutality and didacticism of Christ’s
immense suffering. In Thomas Mann’s The
Magic Mountain, the naïve
German protagonist, Hans Castorp, encounters a Jewish apostate-turned-Jesuit
named Naphta, a brilliant, unattractive skeptic who wittily espouses mysticism,
terror, absolute order and despotism. Naphta is recuperating from tuberculosis
in Davos, Switzerland, and his impoverished cottage hides an interior
of incongruous baroque luxury. Amid the elegant furniture, plentiful purplish
silk, and bookshelves lies a carefully-designed focal point: a grotesquely
Gothic pieta, “with crudely emphasized and ignorant anatomy, the hanging
head bristling with thorns, face and limbs blood-sprinkled, great globs
of blood welling from the wound in the side and from the nail-prints in
hands and feet.”
Castrop is spellbound
by this “pious horror” and questions Naphta of its “ugly” significance.
For the Jesuit Naphta, the medieval pieta is a provocative repudiation
of both the classical and the Renaissance image of Christ, the graceful
humanistic beauty typical of ancient sculptors and Michelangelo alike.
“No more of the palliating and beautifying that the Roman epoch thought
proper to a depiction of the Crucifixion: here you have no royal crown,
no majestic triumph over martyrdom and the world. It is the most utter
and radical declaration of submission to suffering and the weakness of
the flesh. Pessimistic and ascetic – it is Gothic art alone which is truly
that.”
And despite its more
intriguing and sumptuous surroundings, at its core it is gothic art that
Gibson has created, complete with a radical declaration of submission.
Gibson’s Christ is deeply frightened in Gethsemane with the foreknowledge
of what awaits him, but his courage quickly recovers and his appeal for
patriarchal clemency seems perfunctory. After the briefest of inquiries
into other possible fates he submits and submits and submits.
His endurance and defiance of death until the appointed moment
is not merely heroic, it is superhuman. Time and again, this deity comes
back to life on the cross to utter another line from another gospel in
an agonizing effort to be correctly canonical.
It is a vision of Christ
profoundly different from the last controversial film on his death – Scorsese’s
1988 adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese and Kazantzakis’ Jesus is a man profoundly
conflicted over his divine nature to the point of apparent schizophrenia.
With the broader scope of The Last Temptation, this struggle between divinity and man is contextualized through Christ’s
life and ministry. Kazantzakis’ conceit was to imagine a moment in which
Christ, on the cross, fleetingly ponders a fantasy in which he is allowed
“the smooth, easy road of men,” but strives against it and accepts sacrifice.
His agonies and struggles are all the more heroic because they are all
the more human. Gibson borrows much from Scorsese’s soundtrack (Peter
Gabriel’s brilliant Passion)
but neglects the complexity of a credibly human Christ.
Why this image of Christ
now? Why put forth such a truncated, terrible vision in a time of Terror?
Why the archaic insistence on suffering and submission over the many facets
of Christ’s message? Throughout its painful evolution as an institution,
recalcitrant elements of the Catholic Church, in times of crisis, have
sought to return to the fundamentals that best serve power. Suffering
and submission are cherished Church concepts well suited to quell division,
debate and democratic calls for reform. Accompanying them in Gibson’s
film are a few minor flourishes with broader Catholic appeal: a strong
focus on Mary, and a scene in which Christ presses his mangled face into
a clean shroud handed to him by a compassionate Jewess. (No surprise that
actor James Cavaziel’s elegant aquiline schnoz bares a good resemblance
to that on the Shroud of Turin.) Evangelical Protestants might have objected
to these small emphases, but have instead tactically reasoned that the
differences are slight and any popular, dramatic focus on Jesus can bolster
their faith as well. Common fundamentalisms can overlook a few quirks
of theology for the greater glory of gothic art.
I
Have Nightmares - Morgan Meis
I
was actually frightened to see The Passion of the Christ for the simple
reason that I am a delicate boy. I have nightmares. I don’t like seeing
people’s flesh ripped from their bones. But I had to see it eventually
and I did. Much flesh is rent, much blood spilled: I don’t know how the
spikes looked going through the hands because my eyes were closed but
it sounded bad enough; kind of a squishing, spurting sound.
In the end it must be said that The Passion is both a powerful and a not at all powerful film.
The latter first. The danger that The Passion poses to anyone, any creed, any group, anything at
all just doesn’t strike me as being there in the film. The film is not
anti-Semitic by any reasonable standard given the subject matter. Indeed,
it takes some pains to be less anti-Semitic than it otherwise might have
been seeing that the Gibsons fils et pere
have become enamored of rather repugnant intellectual strands of their
religion. Many people are simply freaked out by Christ and there’s no
shame in that, it's a weird story, but on this one it would make more
sense to relax. The Christian conspiracy angle seems overblown as well.
In their hearts the Protestant Evangelical types have to realize that
this isn’t exactly their Christ. This is a deeply Catholic Christ, one
whose message of sin and redemption is less about righteousness and more
about abandonment in the paradox of the human condition and its relation
to the divine: fated to sin, fated to suffer, but guilty all the same.
This Christ isn’t taken to all the yammering of today’s Protestant Fundamentalists.
He’s too wrapped up in thinking about his own crucifixion.
Thus the second point. If you happen to think that
Christianity is about a meditation on the suffering of Christ, the fact
that God took on bodily form in order to suffer and die for our sins,
then you have quite a night ahead of you. This film is about images of
suffering and those images are meant to speak for themselves. Here the
claims that Mel Gibson brings an action movie stupidity to the Gospels
misses the point. There is a tradition in Christianity in which Christ’s
bodily suffering is exactly that. The more he suffers the more we take
seriously the reciprocal redemption in the face of our sins. Gibson aims
to give us quite a lot of that bodily suffering (I refer you back to the
spike noises). In fact, Gibson is right that this film could have been
shown without subtitles. It's a non-discursive film with an essentially
non-discursive Christ. He’s a Medieval Christ, a Christ to stare at on
the cross, a Christ whose suffering is the alpha and the omega of his
being. It doesn’t really matter all too much what he says, that is not
what he is here for. He is here to dither around making tables for thirty-three
years until he can get up on that cross where he belongs. Again, and I
can’t say it too many times, it is all about the suffering. Actually the
film could have been shot with only one line of dialogue. Just after Jesus
asks for a sip of vinegar on the cross he utters the line (at least according
to John 19:30) “It is accomplished” and then expires. I haven’t got any
use for this Jesus, or for any other for that matter, but one ought to
give Gibson his due, he has produced a testament to Christ’s suffering
that makes that suffering about as palpable as it could be for those not
invited to the scourging itself.
Out, Brief Candle -
Emile Bessels
Like
the leftist Slovenian philosopher Slajov Zizek, and unlike the atheist
Bertrand Russell or the medieval Catholic Mel Gibson, I think that there
is a great deal in the Christian message worth fighting for – equality
and redistribution of wealth, for starters. It has been noted that almost
nothing of Jesus’ message is retained by Gibson in The Passion of the
Christ. The movie is no less powerful
for all that. In fact, its power is so unnerving that I suspect that the
controversy surrounding the film stems largely from a liberal inability
to deal with the genuine terror that it unleashes in the heart. It is
the horror of seeing what is essentially a snuff film in which the victim
is God and in which God refuses to stop the tape rolling. A great deal
of ink has been spilt trying to deny that the film is brilliant. But brilliant
it is, like The Will to Power: brilliant and terrifying and nasty.
The
Passion is
no more anti-Semitic than anything else in Christianity, and, with reference
to that particular controversy, I am reminded of the comment of the Joker’s
plastic surgeon in Tim Burton’s Batman: “Look what I have to work with!”
Gibson, who is remarkably near
to a holocaust denier, actually seems to have gone out of his way to mute
his own prejudices. In fact, the film portrays Roman anti-Semitism – a soldier
uses the word “Jew” as a belittling curse, a soldier one is meant to loathe
– but it also depicts an irrationally bloodthirsty Jewish throng that
appalls the more classy of the Empire’s representatives. It is also true
that the film continues the fantastic whitewash job on the Romans, particularly
Pontius Pilate, that the writers of the gospels began so many centuries
ago when they were trying to insert their radically humanistic teaching
into an imperial culture.
The
problem isn’t racism, or even the film’s relentless physical violence.
It is actually a major cinematic accomplishment to terrify an audience
so badly – there is, of course, an entire horror genre that mostly fails
to come even close to the level of fright that The Passion induces. The problem is that
most of what you learn from The Passion has to do with how the human body stands up under
brutal torture (not very well).
The
suppression of Jesus’ message for an iconographic depiction of his suffering
is an old trick that kept the hoi-polloi down for centuries. That was
pre-literate Catholicism, in which translations of the Bible into vulgar
languages like English would get you burnt to a crisp. If people didn’t
know what Jesus said, they couldn’t argue with tradition, with what was
handed down, a blood cult of gruesome torture which decayed the radical
heart of the philosophy in the New Testament. Contemporary Catholicism,
with Vatican II and Liberation Theology, has mostly left this in the dust.
What Mel Gibson is peddling is post-literate Catholicism, in which the
ultimate propaganda machine, the moving image, replaces the old icons
that bewitched the medieval imagination. It is a hieroglyphic concept
in which writing – the Bible itself – is hidden behind images of pathos
so extreme that one is supposed to be afraid to contradict them. It’s
no coincidence that the production company responsible for the film is
called “Icon.”
To
watch The Passion is to be swept up in a profound visionary experience that is real,
deep, and moving. No wonder its garroting effect on culture lasted so
long. Just as the Latin Mass kept the audience in the dark, so too does
Gibson’s Aramaic-with-subtitles keep one at arm’s length from what Jesus
had to say. Why was Jesus a thorn in the side of the powers that be? What
were his views on religious customs? How is it appropriate to live using
Jesus as a moral exemplar? To the extent that one finds out the answers
to these questions from the movie, the answers are mostly wrong. For it
is by faith alone, not by constantly rehashing the marks made on the body
of Christ by Roman flails, that one enters the Kingdom of Heaven in Christian
teaching. The Passion tries to reverse time by bringing
the viewer to the scene of Jesus’ death. Kierkegaard had a better idea,
which was to time travel as a philosophical Christian disciple, not simply
as a witness to a public execution.
Upon
exiting the film, in a state of heightened fear and concern for the fragility
of human flesh, and with a renewed sense of why, given that The Passion
is America’s number one film,
this country is too absorbed by religious fanaticism to lead the world,
I saw a poster for an upcoming attraction called Walking Tall, starring former World Wrestling
Federation phenom The Rock. On the poster, The Rock is carrying a smacking
stick and looking mad as hell, like he’s about to swing his plank of wood
– an anti-crucifix? – into the heads of some sonofabitches who are keeping
the people down. It struck me that this was the kind of friend that Christ
really could have used, a head-buster to take down the hypocrites, assorted
jerkwads, and hand-washing wimps that either persecute and exploit the
weak or else leave them to rot. Perhaps in the sequel…
The
Unbearable Righteousness of Victimhood - Ori Weisberg
It seems fitting to open a piece on Mel Gibson’s “The
Passion of the Christ,” a staging of the central narrative of the Christian
tradition/s, with a confession: I cannot imagine a version of this story
with which I would be completely comfortable.
One of the main reasons for this is that American Jewish identity
is to some extent experienced as that of the white person who does not
believe in Jesus. It of course
cannot be reduced to this, nor is it homogeneous.
But it creates a very different and particularly charged context
from that of other non-believers, whether secular descendents of Christians,
or non-westerners whose families hail from locations outside what once
was called “Christendom.” Jews are not non-believers, but active
disbelievers. We
are (mostly) white, and happily so, for whiteness still guarantees a level
of enfranchisement and participation in society not yet fully open to
all. In fact, American Jews may by and large
be more proficient at naming prominent Jews in the history of American
culture (Koufax, Dylan, Kissinger, Spielberg, Dr. Ruth) than in naming
influential figures in the development of Rabbinic Judaism (Yohanan ben
Zakkai, Aqiva, Yehudah Ha-Nasi, Al-Fasi, Rashi).
But despite aspirations to acceptance, insofar as we reject Jesus—and
have suffered for it—we remain different.
The desire to belong and yet to remain distinct, unassimilated,
particular, and unique is thus negotiated to a large extent around the
figure of the crucified and resurrected Jesus.
The rejection of Jesus is not only central for contemporary
Jews, but ingrained in its history. This is not to say that Jewish identity is derivative of Christianity,
or at least any more than Christianity, founded on the rejection (or supersession)
of a form of Judaism, can be reduced to a derivative tradition. Here we have the crux of the issue, so
to speak. The accepted understanding—though
not by most scholars of the subject—of the relationship between Judaism
and Christianity is one of mother to daughter. Both Jews and Christians have an ideological
investment in this view. For
Jews it is a claim of origin and for Christians a claim of perfection.
Both are strategies for arguing authenticity and validity. But the concept of a filial relationship between Judaism and
Christianity is by and large a blatant misunderstanding.
The truth of the matter is that Judaism and Christianity
are closer to cousins. Both
Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity developed out of a range of movements
in Second Temple Judaism. The
formative period for each thus overlapped temporally and geographically
with that of the other and the final split seems to have occurred sometime
in the second century. Despite these shared roots, and largely
because of them, the dialogue was contentious nearly from the outset.
This is partially attributable to the fact
that there was little in late Second Temple culture and in that of Judea
following the destruction that was not marked by contention. Rabbinic texts even hold the intense divisiveness
of the period as one of the reasons for the Temple’s destruction. From that time, until the Christianization
of the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE, the two movements
were consistently engaged with each other, competing for the same population
early on and frequently polemicizing against each other. The resulting cross-pollenization contributed
to each. Contemporary religions
that descend from the Rabbinic and Jesus movements thus share ideas found
in the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament, ideas from the Second Temple period,
and ideas honed and traded in the exchanges that led to the split between
them and in the polemics that followed.
The dialogue that informed these emergent traditions was not between
adherents of Hebrew Scriptures and those who wanted to add the “New Testament,”
but between those who followed the Gospels and those who followed foundational
Rabbinic texts. Neither trajectory
can be understood without reference to the other.
The Rabbinic movement eventually triumphed among the
majority of ethnic Jews and the Jesus movement turned outward bearing
significant bitterness toward its erstwhile foes. Not only did Jews reject Jesus in his lifetime, but they rejected
him in those who followed/formulated and sought to institutionalize his
message. When the Roman Empire
became Christian, this bitterness helped to set the stage for a history
of violence against dispersed Jewish communities. In medieval Europe, anti-Judaism/Semitism found popular expression
in pageants and performances of the Passion. Though this may not have been their sole purpose, it was an
undeniable factor.
Gibson’s film owes a great deal to the embellishments
introduced by these Passion Play traditions.
One of their most toxic tendencies was to facilitate a claim of
victimhood which cast Jews in the role of victimizers and encouraged Christians
to defend themselves. Those
medieval Christians who tortured, murdered, and expelled Jews were not
simply sadistic bigots. Many sincerely believed they had justice
on their side and, most importantly, that they were the vulnerable ones. The claim of victimhood is a claim of license to exercise power
in extreme form. Sometimes
this is valid. While no one
I consider intelligible accepts the validity of the victimhood claim in
Al Qaeda’s rhetoric, everyone whose thinking I do recognize as intelligible
acknowledges that the victims of 9/11 are justification aplenty for pursuing
the organizations that perpetrated the attack and who are planning more. But consensus is not always available. The “security fence” that the Israeli
government is constructing between the Palestinian populations it occupies
and the Jewish populations it represents is a case in point.
The volatility of the victimhood claim and its currency
in contemporary cultural and political discourse is at the center of the
controversy surrounding Gibson’s film.
In the decades following WWII there was a broad awareness of the
history of Jewish suffering in Western countries.
Israeli militarism was shielded from critique by its insistence
that the Jewish people would never again become victims. The sixties brought profound attention to the injustices suffered
by African Americans and the inequalities suffered by women in an attempt
to address ongoing victimizations.
But by the eighties, the religious right adopted similar rhetoric
and has continued until today with claims that Christians are discriminated
against, feminists oppress men, and affirmative action disenfranchises
whites. No one considers the chances of a presidential candidate serious
unless he is 1) white, 2) clearly states a belief in the divinity of Jesus,
3) possesses a penis, and 4) is committed to exclusively applying it sexually
with one woman of the same race and with whom he shares a government license
to do so. But this fails
to discourage the white, male, Christian, heterosexuals of the religious
right who claim victimhood. Many
of these believe with utmost sincerity that marriage is under attack,
as if state recognition of same-sex marriage will lead to the appearance
of a gay SWAT team one night in my bliss-filled heterosexual marital bedroom
that will serve me divorce papers and thrust me under a huppah
with a groom selected from a float in last year’s Pride parade.
Now we have a multi-millionaire mega-star who can make
any film he wants (and just proved it) who could not have jumped any quicker
to claim victimhood when his project raised eyebrows. Gibson even voiced fears of being “crucified,” though he meant
it figuratively, I think. On
the other side, leaders of Jewish organizations voiced legitimate concerns
in ways that seemed like new variations on well-rehearsed, borderline
hysterical ADL sound bites. Gibson’s
victim comments were fuel to the fire and they burned back at him, creating
free publicity and platforms for all involved (and now myself) as well
as ticket sales that guaranteed a hit (though I am undecided as to whether
that was part of the producer’s marketing plan).
Where medieval Passion Plays painted Christians as victims and
facilitated the victimization of Jews, Gibson’s “Passion” was marketed
through his own claim of victimization which also represented an attempt
to discredit those who were genuinely concerned he was repeating an old
pattern of inciting and validating violence.
Important issues of historical sensitivity and responsibility on
the one hand and religious and artistic freedom on the other, issues central
to questions of the ethics of representation, were mostly lost in the
fray. Instead the public reaction seemed to devolve upon the old
debate surrounding the quote with which “The Passion of the Christ” opens. Before we ever see Jesus in the Gethsemane,
we are presented with a line from the Isaiah 53, his “suffering servant.”
Jews understand this passage as a poetic
depiction of Israel’s future travails while Christians read it as the
prophesy of an individual figure fulfilled in Christ. So much for the accusation that Jews are the literalists.
According to the first reading the Jews are the victims while according
to the second, the victim is Jesus and “the Jews,” or at least the Judeans
involved in the crucifixion, are the victimizers.
Historically, both ways Jews end up losing.
The terms of the debate about the film thus reproduce
the debate in which its story is implicated.
Both are passionate, and so is Gibson’s film. Those who see no artistic merit in this work possess different
criteria for what constitutes artistic merit from mine. There is a consensus that the cinematography
is of very high quality, but this amounts to more than pretty moving pictures.
“The Passion of the Christ” contains one of the most poetic moments
I have ever seen on film. The
moment Christ gives up his spirit, the moment he literally expires,
the shot zooms out, upward into the gathering clouds accompanied by the
sound of a wind. It hangs
there for a moment looking down on the three crosses then begins to fall. As it accelerates, it distorts into a
curve then suddenly explodes, the first drop of the cloudburst that in
Christian tradition symbolizes Satan’s defeat. After being transported upward with the liberation of Jesus’s
suffering soul, we are cast down inside a tear, the vanguard of the downpour
that cleanses the earth. It
is one of those cinematic moments that is either is so far over the top
as to be ridiculous, or profoundly moving in a only film can be, either a huge flop or huge payoff, and I found
it to be the latter. Many
of the portrayals are excellent, including the two Marys (Morgenstern
and Bellucci) and Simon of Cyrene (Merz).
Caviezel’s Jesus commands us to watch his powerful passivity and
endurance, even when we cannot bear to, following the same directive he
gives the disciples in the moment before he is taken.
Two major criticisms seem to unite the film’s detractors:
its excessive brutality and anti-Semitic implications. As for the former, it has been noted that
numerous critically acclaimed films are equally graphic. In fact, one of my biggest problems with
Roberto Benigni’s much adored “Life is Beautiful” was its sugar coating.
Instead of a concentration camp, he showed us a prison camp in
which the main character was marched off screen before being murdered
in a move that was nothing less than fundamentally dishonest.
Nazis, like Romans, were not discrete about shedding blood and
often did so precisely in order to terrify and demoralize their victims’
constituencies. What Gibson’s Jesus endures seems excessive
only in that the reasons for the depth of the brutality are left unclear.
As the other two men crucified with him are not beaten every step
of the way, Roman sadism cannot be seen here as indiscriminate.
Both the soldiers and the Jews before them seem to have a very
particular investment in his suffering.
But the theological justification that Christ suffered more than
any other human in history does not suffice for the internal coherence
of the narrative.
The question of anti-Semitic implications is more difficult.
Its answer partially lies in whether the viewer sees the Judeans
on screen as representative of “the Jews” or not.
My assumption was that those who showed compassion and sympathy
toward Jesus were “converted” and thus distinguished from the mob.
This is of course a great anachronism. As noted above, the Jesus movement only became distinct from
other Judaisms roughly a hundred years later. My perspective thus involves a projection that these figures
and their descendents would “become” Christians while the rest would “remain”
Jews. This assumption is
not mistaken, but conditioned by a familiarity with the history of the
story’s inflammatory performances.
In medieval Passion Plays, some of which continued into the modern
period and at least one of which is still performed today, all sympathetic
figures were taken to be Christians and the rest either Romans (who would
eventually be converted by Constantine) or, significantly “the Jews.”
Given the violence of that history, a more responsible and sensitive
rendition would have taken pains to refute this.
Ultimately, my problems with Gibson’s film connect
to ideas of sensitivity and responsibility, neither of which have anything
necessarily to do with artistic achievement as such.
For instance, Leni Riefenstahl was included among the recently
deceased honorees at this year’s Academy awards.
I do not demand that Gibson apologetically alter scriptures he
considers sacred. But if
he indeed wants to disavow anti-Semitism, I think he needs to take their
historical abuse into account. As
I watched the Romans reduce a Jew (Jesus) into a quivering mass of torn
flesh, I watched them destroy one of thousands of Jews they tortured to
death and was reminded of how the Christianized Empire and Roman Catholic
Church continued torturing Jews to death up until relatively recent times.
If Jesus’s message is one of love and forgiveness, of recognizing
not only God in a human but the
divine in all humans, then many Christians, including most of those
who participated in Passion Plays over the centuries failed to understand
it, often at the expense of their Jewish neighbors. Gibson’s message may not be the same as that of his predecessors,
but if not, it is not enough for him to deny it. In fact, I should think he would be eager
to demonstrate how his rendition is distinct with regard to these issues,
and thus more true to the loving Holy Spirit he claims guided him in its
production. Though his film
is powerful, ambitious, and occasionally beautiful, it lacks the sensitivity
and responsibility which would make it compassionate, just as Christianity
has often achieved the first three but failed the rest.
I do not fault Gibson for departing from the Gospels
any more than I fault renaissance painters for the anachronisms and departures
of their particular artistic visions.
If he had fulfilled his literalist claim, it would not have been
much of a film. All commentators
enter into the spaces within a text and fill them with their insights. The fact that Gibson hesitated to own
up to this smacks of either irresponsibility or cowardice. My concerns neither arise from his scriptural
adherence nor his exercise of artistic license, but in his specific applications
of both. There are four Gospels
and where they are in agreement a faithful rendition can be expected to
follow. Where they disagree
there are options, as there are when only some include a particular or
where none do.
Gibson presents a psychologically complex Pilate, caught
in a complicated political situation.
Unfortunately this highlights how simple he leaves Caiaphas and
his followers. The Sanhedrin
was a complex entity headed by a sometime tyrant, sometime figurehead,
selected from the Judean Priest caste (the Cohanim) by the Romans themselves. While several members of Gibson’s Sanhedrin
dissent at Jesus’s trial, the resentment many of them held toward the
High Priest imposed by their conquerors might have been portrayed to further
emphasize diversity of ideological perspective and allegiance. As for Caiaphas himself, it is not clear
why he wants Christ not only killed, but crucified. If he indeed saw Jesus as a threat to
his power, it follows that he would want him discredited or quietly disposed
of. Displaying Jesus’s mortality
might have accomplished the former, though not necessarily. First, immortality and the idea of the
incarnation of the Godhead in human flesh was not standard messianic doctrine.
The murder of a descendent of David and pretender to his throne
might have created a unifying rallying point for different rebel factions.
Furthermore, death would not necessarily discredit him as a prophetic
figure. Beheading certainly
did not diffuse the cult of John the Baptist.
Caiaphas’s single-mindedness about crucifying Jesus therefore demands
either clarification of context or of character. Otherwise, he is simply demonic.
The figure of Barabbas further complicates, or could
have been used to complicate, the situation.
In Matthew, he is called a “notorious prisoner” and in John “a
bandit.” But in Mark and Luke, he is implicated
in a “murder” which was part of an “insurrection,” and Mark explicitly
connects him with “rebels.” Including
these latter details could reveal why the crowd called for his release. Barabbas was apparently the member of
an underground resistance to Roman rule.
Indeed “Barabbas” means “Son of Father,” a non-name alias equivalent
to John Doe, a sort of “Boy Dadson.”
His compatriots would have eagerly manipulated the crowd in his
favor. Their calls to crucify Jesus could then
been seen as part of this
effort. Instead, Gibson’s
Barabbas is nothing more than a slobbering degenerate. Caiaphas claims him as “one of ours,” whatever that means,
something not found in scripture.
Since the factionalism of the period was not made clear, which
“ours” is this? Is this “ours” a reference to “the Jews?”
Had Barabbas been portrayed as a rebel, Caiaphas would not have
claimed him at all, for his own power was as dependent upon keeping the
peace as his sponsor Pilate’s. Such an utterly unsympathetic Barabbas
focuses us on the mob’s blind hatred for Jesus. Gibson presents us with a traditional Passion Play hate fest,
devoid of the nuance which could have been supplied from historical study
and from the Gospels themselves, nuance which would not have compromised
his message of Christ’s salvific martyrdom. In fact, it would have rendered the situation more real, more
modern, and thus bolstered his contention that we are all culpable in
Jesus’s death.
The question of Judeans’ violent attitude toward Jesus
is perplexing in general. When
he is taken at Gethsemane, Temple police do not merely “lay hands upon
him” and lead him to the High Priest as in scripture, but begin immediately
to brutalize him, beating him and throwing him off a bridge while holding
his chain in a move that surely would have broken his back and compromised
delivery of their charge. Gibson cannot hide behind the Gospels
here. This is extra-biblical
Judean violence. Similar
anti-Semitic scenes are found, however, in medieval writings such as those
of the mystic Margery Kempe. Likewise,
when Jesus is taken along the Via Dolorosa, the continued brutality of
the Romans and the throngs of Jerusalemites, many of whom scream at Jesus,
shake their fists, and otherwise taunt him along the way, have no scriptural
referent. The entire tradition of the “stations
of the cross” is a post-biblical embellishment. The only Gospel that mentions the public’s presence at this
stage is Luke: “A great number of the people followed him, and among them
women who were beating their breasts” (23:27).
While Gibson includes some sympathetic faces, there is no basis
at all for unsympathetic ones. Certainly
some of these were the same who had called for his crucifixion, but if
that was primarily to ensure Barabbas’s freedom, one could imagine their
remorse over the im/moral compromise of the trade-off.
After all, Roman crucifixion of Jews was one of the very things
the rebels were trying to stop.
Instead of screaming mobs—though again, not monolithically relishing
Jesus’s torture—Gibson might have embellished scripture with the silent
anger and agony of Jews watching one more of their own being led to the
slaughter by their oppressors, tainting their celebration of Passover,
the feast of liberation from slavery.
He might have even showed Barabbas and his comrades barely restraining
their knives in windows and alleyways as Jesus went by, conserving their
anti-Roman fury for a more opportune moment.
In all of these cases, Gibson could have employed scripture, history,
and artistic license to mitigate the anti-Jewish sentiments this dramatic
form has historically employed and aroused.
It would have not been less Christian or less true to the Gospels. Instead, he implicated himself through
a lack of sensitivity and responsibility in a brutal history casting many
Judeans, and thus many Jews, as hate filled antagonists. He leaves it to us whether to extend it to all “the Jews,”
disavowing this as his intention without impeding the possible result. My suggestions here are only some among
many options he might have taken to ensure that his “Passion” was different
from so many of its predecessors.
One might argue that historical authenticity is not the aim of
the film. But if not then why use Aramaic? Is it not to give viewers the sense of
access to the historicity of these events?
Finally, with these scenes as background, how are we
to understand his epilogue? Throughout
the film, Gibson concentrates on Christ as a way to transcend this world.
This is not a Christianity that imposes social responsibility;
that supports theologies of liberation, consciousness of sickness, poverty,
and political oppression; that emphasizes human dignity and seeks to alleviate
suffering. Those Christianities are not fantasies. They exist, just not here. In “The Passion of the Christ,” the world
is horrible and Jesus’s promise is that through him we can transcend it.
Thus one expects a resurrected Jesus who is at peace and whose
eyes are directed upwards. Instead, we get a flash of his level profile,
set in a terminator’s determined gaze, exiting his tomb to martial drums.
This is not a Christ who seems bent on healing rifts, on forgiving,
on reconciling, on comforting. Given what we just watched him suffer
for over two hours, the question of vengeance was unavoidable for me. I can only hope that the more responsible
participants in the conversation Gibson re/awakened will clarify the message
he claims, where his epic left it obscure.
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OTR Comment - March, 2004