Mar 08 2004
Passion Of The Christ
Last Friday I went to see The Passion of the
Christ, deciding that anything this controversial would have to be
interesting, if nothing else. I just had to write an article about
this — not that I will be able to say anything different or
novel, but just to get it out of my head. I’d just like to clarify
that I’m not Christian, not Jewish, and no doubt this renders me
unable to say anything about the movie without both sides of
the controversy getting angry and offended.
The movie is violent and bloody, almost pornographic in its gross
intensity. I have never seen another movie that went to so much effort
to show, lovingly and with ultimate technical expertise, torture.
It’s the closest thing to a religious snuff film that you’ll ever see.
For example, it shows how the hooks from a whip can grab into a man’s
flesh and rip it apart, done in slow motion and realistically as
possible. Or take note of the efforts that the movie makers have put
into making the crucifixion look as realistic as possible, including a
minute or two with closeups on the hand as the spike is driven into
the cross.
The ultimate irony, of course, is this is about Jesus: and what is
meant to be the loving and forgiving nature of his philosophy has been
turned into a two-hour bloodfest. Church groups are going to this
movie in droves, and it has turned out to have more preticket sales
than the Lord of the Rings. This seems amazing to me. Instead of
spending Sunday drinking the metaphorical blood of Christ at
sacrament, this movie forces them to watch buckets of fake blood spew
onto the stony ground.
The movie presumes that you know the bible already — if you
were not familiar with it, then you could easily miss that Mary
Magdalene was a prostitute, or that the old men persecuting Jesus were
Jewish. For that matter, if you went out for popcorn at the wrong time
you could easily miss the Resurrection… it’s been relegated to a 10
second spot at the end of the movie, no doubt to leave room for a
sequel.
It’s ironic, really, that the reviews of this movie seem to so
closely aligned to the viewer’s religious faith: that is, I keep
reading reviews about people that are “moved” and think that the movie
is great, and they always seem to be fairly religious. Yet, I would
think that this movie would inflame the faithful more: they
would know his teachings, why would they choose for his lesson to be
taught in this way? I didn’t come out of the movie feeling awe for the
sacrifice of Jesus, but instead came out feeling sick. This movie does
not seem like good testimony if it only appeals to the believers.
I hear that Mel Gibson has decided to make a movie about Abraham
Lincoln. It will portray the south as cackling, evil brutes; Lincoln
as a complete saint; it will cover his accomplishments in about five
minutes, with one or two lines from the Gettysburg address and maybe a
mention of the Emancipation Proclamation; and the rest of the 110
minutes of movie will cover just Lincoln in Ford’s Theater, with over
an hour devoted to showing the bullet slowly passing through Lincoln’s
brain, spewing bone and flesh and blood all along.