Talk About The Passion

Bethany: You're saying that having beliefs is a bad thing?
Rufus: I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier.

- Dogma

On Tuesday night, Zappagirl and I attended a showing of The Passion of the Christ. Yeah, you heard me right. Apparently someone at my parents’ church bought up a bajillion preview tickets and my mother offered two of them to me.

I suppose I should mention at this point that I don’t personally subscribe to any organized religion at this time in my life. I was raised Baptist, converted to Presbyterianism as a teenager, attended a few Catholic masses with an ex-boyfriend in my early twenties, and have even tagged along with some friends at a few Buddhist celebrations. I’m an equal opportunity spiritualist, and have the nifty jewelry to prove it.

Despite my checking of the “other” box on the religion question, I have a fascination with the portrayal of religion in film. I joined the UC Film Society in the midst of a massive protest over the screening of Jean Luc Godard’s Hail Mary. (We were just trying to find an art film to fill a weekend slot. Figures we’d pick one that was banned by the Vatican and would result in death threats left on the office answering machine.) I worked the door for the Friday night showings, sat through the movie twice (well, I fell asleep in the middle of the second showing), and proclaimed the movie to be long, boring, and French. Not blasphemous.

I reprised my role at the door when we showed The Last Temptation of Christ a few years later. Despite our screening being the Cincinnati premiere, there was little furor over it. (I think there was one phone message, telling us that we were really really bad people.) I recall liking the movie, but it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen it that all I can remember is Barbara Hershey’s collagen-injected lips and Harvey Keitel playing Judas with a Brooklyn accent.

I also went to see Dogma on opening night, but that has more to do with me being a Kevin Smith fan that anything else. Despite the inclusion of loads of profanity and a rubber poop monster, I still agree with the ideas put forth in this movie more than any other religious film.

I had been interested in seeing The Passion of the Christ ever since the first rumors started flying around the internet last year. Mel Gibson was making a movie in two dead languages, with no subtitles? (Mel changed his mind, and subtitles were added for most of the movie.) The guy playing Jesus got struck by lightning on the set? Color me there!

Unfortunately, after reading countless interviews with Mel going on about the accuracy of his film (despite the use of questionable supplemental material from Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, an 18th century stigmatic nun) and people converting to Christianity on the set simply by working on the film and how Hollywood would probably reject him after this project, I started to get irritated with his holier-than-thou martyr routine. (Hey Mel? It’s hard to be a martyr when your movie is opening on over 4500 screens.)

Despite all of this, I still wanted to see the movie. Even through my disgust with the free publicity being created by the controversy, I still wanted to see it. (The woman who runs this site is accepting donations to run radio ads for the film. What a marketing gimmick! Get other people to advertise your movie and foot the bill!) Even with the absolute tackiness of the merchandising tie-ins, I still wanted to see the movie. I didn’t necessarily want to put any money in Mel’s pocket, though.

But, as I said, my parents’ church picked up the tab, and didn’t seem to have any qualms about sharing their tickets with the heathens in the black leather biker jackets. (Although someone in the bathroom did ask us to pray for the people sitting next to her, but only if we were Christians. I guess that pagan prayers are unacceptable.)

So enough with all this exposition, right? What did I think of the movie?

I thought it was thought-provoking, although I doubt they were the thoughts intended by Mel.

For a movie that is being primed as a teaching tool for churches nationwide, there seemed to be very little about compassion and the spiritual hope that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were supposed to convey. The movie starts at Gethsemene, and with the exception of a few (really brief) flashbacks, the audience is given little history as to why all of this is happening. If someone who was not familiar with the New Testament went to see this movie, they would no doubt be pretty confused. There’s no context to the story being told here, and without that balance the movie becomes less of an evangelical tool and more of a religious snuff film. (More than one critic has dubbed it the first spiritual splatter film.) After watching two hours-plus of a man being graphically tortured and slowly put to death, it would have been nice to know a bit more about why he had been so condemned. (We are told that Caiphas and the Sanhedrin really hate Jesus, and that’s about it.) In my opinion, a story with less slow-motion scourging and more love-thy-neighbor would’ve been a much more effective ministering tool.

But then again, the name of the movie is The Passion of the Christ, which means portraying the suffering of the crucifixion. If only there had been more than that brief touch of the resurrection! (And less of that bad martial out-for-vengeance music – I later remarked to Zappagirl that I’d almost expected Jesus to flash a “that’s right, I’m back – to kick some Pharisee butt!” look at the camera before he strolled out of the tomb.)

Oops. Hope I didn’t spoil the ending there for anyone.

While watching the relentless torture scenes, I realized the majority of the audience was probably thinking something along the lines of “How awful that Jesus should have gone through such horrible pain!” I was a little less discriminating. I was thinking how awful it was that any person should have gone through such horrible pain. Zappagirl later remarked that the torture scenes brought to mind the same kind of senseless violence enacted upon Matthew Sheppard, and after reading entirely too much about that recent blemish in human history (in the name of research for a piece that I wrote for Roger Mexico while he was working on a production of The Laramie Project), I had to agree with her. How can one person do something that awful to someone else, based on disagreement of beliefs?

For all of his grandstanding about telling the authentic and definitive version of the story, there seemed to be a bit of fact-bending going on to suit the plot. Pilate is portrayed as a wishy-washy guy who spends much of his screen time contemplating what truth is and how to avoid condemning to death a man he found to be innocent. According to most historical accounts that I’ve read, he was actually quite a nasty guy whose atrocities caused him to be removed from his post by the Roman Empire. (I’m no theologian; what little knowledge I have is mostly due to watching Dateline the other night and poking around on the internet – the message boards on Fametracker for both the movie and Mel Gibson are quite enlightening.)

And was King Herod really that much of a foppish idiot? (I found myself humming “King Herod’s Song” from Jesus Christ Superstar at this point in the movie, which I suppose was better than when both Zappagirl and I started humming System of a Down at the end of the crucifixion.)

And the androgynous Satan figure was just silly and unnecessary. Yes, yes, evil is lurking everywhere. We get it.

I personally did not find the movie anti-semitic, but there are details that could be interpreted as such by those looking for justification for their bigotry. (The same can be said for pretty much all of the Bible. One needs to keep in mind that the Bible has been edited and reworded several times over the years to reflect the beliefs of the editors. I'm sure by this point most of the world has received the open letter to Dr. Laura which simply points out that you can justify practically anything with the right Bible verse.)

And for crying out loud, Mel. By this point, it’s a pretty well known fact that nails through the hands would not support a human body. Crucifixions were generally performed by driving the nails between the ulna and the radius bones in the wrist. Yes, I realize it's not as dramatic, but I thought we were going for authenticy here? Especially in the scene where your own hand makes a guest appearance?

OK, enough with the nitpicking.

On the positive side, the cinematography is breathtaking in the movie. Maia Morgernstern is wonderful as Mary (Jesus’s mother – there are entirely too many Marys in this story, which is why I think Mary Magdalene gets identified as three or four different women throughout the course of the gospels), as is Hristo Naumov Shopov as Pilate. Despite the questionable validity of how his character is written, his portrayal of a man wrestling with his conscience is one of the most moving parts of the film.

Another moving point of the movie is Mary recalling Jesus tripping and falling as a child, juxtaposed as she watches her son stumbling under the weight of the cross. Granted, the flashback was completely fabricated, but it was poignant all the same.

Overall, the movie was a very powerful (if flawed) vision, and I think that the message is lost in the wake of the graphic violence. But in the long run, this is just Mel Gibson’s version of the story, his attempts at expressing his faith on film. I’m glad I saw it and was allowed to form my own opinions on it. And as long as I’m allowed to make up my own mind, so is Mel. So is everyone else, which is what I always thought was the main tenet of Jesus’s message: unconditional love and acceptance for all of humanity.