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Picturing The Passion
09 March 2004Is it porn, horror, or infotainment? By Chris Lehmann There’s an odd sort of eloquence about swiping a credit card into an electronic will-call box office portal (which bears the folksy brand name “Stubby”) and having it spit out an admission ticket that reads “PASSION CHRIST.” I can’t help but remember the scene in Woody Allen’s Sleeper where Miles Monroe confesses his sins to a computer simulation of a priest, after which the screen flashes in digital font, “YOUR SINS ARE FORGIVEN,” to the accompaniment of rapidly ringing bells.
After all the weeks of hoopla surrounding Mel Gibson’s grisly biopic depicting the last hours of Jesus on earth, the film’s producers and promoters no doubt pray for the transaction to be just that simple. As everyone on God’s earth now knows, the film has been engulfed in successive waves of culture-war controversy, involving everything from a papal pronouncement (since retracted) to an opening-night fatal heart attack, claiming a local TV personality in Wichita, Kansas. My field trip into the epicenter of the cross-promotional Christian mythos comes at the behest of an energetic and thoughtful Christian woman whom I’ve met on my weekday commutes. Ever since she espied me reading copy of Rick Warren’s 40-day conversion manual The Purpose Driven Life, we’ve had a series of early morning conversations on various contemporary approaches to matters of faith, though she knows that for all my sympathetic interest in religion I remain a skeptic. (I was in fact, reading Warren’s book for a reviewing assignment, not for any personal illumination.) Nevertheless, she’s invited me along in the company of four other believing friends, three of whom are members of her Monday evening Bible discussion group. As The Passion of the Christ beckons, we’re waiting for one straggler to join us in the lobby of Alexandria’s AMC Potomac Mills multiplex, a hulking, battleship-sized entertainment facility positioned behind a high-end strip mall. A construction crew has been digging out a new access road in front of the theater to accommodate more traffic, which only heightens the sense that we are marooned in some reclusive island of omnientertainment, now screening The Passion on three separate screens. Garfields and Scooby-Dos and Shreks are plastered on every bit of available promotional wall space. Making our way to the theater screening our 9:30 The Passion, we file by a cardboard promotional cut-out for the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” an altogether different tale of sacrifice and resurrection. When one of my companions jokes that she feels a little strange sipping on a cherry Icee as she waits to see her Savior killed, I reply that it’s at least not one of those blue raspberry ones.
We soon see the human agents of his distress in a cutaway shot of Judas meeting with the Sanhedrin, the rabbis and Pharisees who oversee the Jerusalem temple and convey in their every act and utterance the sort of unfeeling villainy you would see in a Punch and Judy landlord. They also, not incidentally, lock firmly into the caricature of Jewish venality and cunning for which Passion plays have been infamous ever since the Middle Ages. The most subtle anti-Semitic trope in the portrayal of the Sanhedrin is also the most telling: the high priest, Caiaphas, is almost never pictured alone. The entire Sanhedrin, in fact, moves continually in a pack -- you imagine that they have to navigate through doors sideways -- and this casual thronging instinct, together with their boxy period headwear and white prayer shawls, gives the impression that they are ancient Hebrew forerunners of the imperial Storm Troopers in Star Wars. As in George Lucas’s cinematic spiritual fables, the effect here is to dpeict a grouped set of evil impulses rather than identifiable individuals.
Yet part of the odd marketing genius of Gibson’s film is that its extreme, extended brutality has largely eclipsed the early alarms raised about its overbroad characterizations of the Jews. The Passion of the Christ is fixated on the sacrificial Christ, so much so that the basis of his ministry -- his preaching and parables, which are after all what attracted his dangerous band of followers and roused the ire of the hateful Sanhedrin -- seems almost entirely beside the point. Admirers of The Passion have defended the movie’s obsession with Jesus as a broken body, and hailed the almost-loving, digitally enhanced lashes of whips and thwacks of crucifixion nails as a triumph of cinematic realism. Christian believers are long accustomed to intoning the rather abstract notion that Jesus died for their sins, and--so the argument goes--Gibson’s film puts flesh and blood (LOTS of blood) on this incantatory claim. But the film’s realism is a dubious proposition at best. Not only does The Passion take very broad thematic liberties with the original that have far more to do with doctrine than verisimilitude (the distinctly medieval-aged depiction of the Sanhedrin, the sudden appearance of Satan in the Sanhedrin’s midst, a whole odd class of child-demons, one of whom appears to be an infant anti-Christ); its exceedingly mannered, and yes, one must concede, pornographic depiction of violence is a far cry from realism, in much the same way that the detail-obsessed, clinical voyeurism of a porn film is a far cry from the experience of sex. This is not to deny the excruciating nature of the Passion: Jesus’ experience of crucifixion had to have been utterly and ineffably (though also literally) crushing. Yet the bad faith of The Passion resides in its handling of the scourging and crucifixion as spectacle. As with violent and pornographic cinema, the accumulation of grisly and painful detail proves deadening to viewers who are asked to do nothing more than compulsively and viscerally re-experience acts they know in advance to be evil and/or illicit. Guiltily, the filmgoer has to wish for Jesus’ death, not so much for the resurrection or the redemption of believers, but out of the simple and entirely defensible human desire for the carnage to cease. Other, far more accomplished gore-minded directors, from Sam Peckinpah to David Cronenberg, have used graphic depictions of the body’s distresses in the service of genuine and sobering meditations on the physical human condition and the always doomed desire to escape or transcend it. Here Gibson has packaged the materials of the greatest Western account of bodily transcendence and sadistically stripped the story of anything other than the body’s most abject suffering.
In this sense, The Passion has less spiritual content than many of the horror films that to which its critical detractors have likened it. An assured horror director such as Cronenberg can propose an awful or shocking premise about bodily being and effectively invert it into a parable about the spiritually insufficient efforts to trick ourselves out of merely physical existence. The account of human nature in The Fly or “Dead Ringers” is an exaggerated version of how people ordinarily exist in the world--much as, say, Goya’s Disasters of War canvases are unanswerable mockeries of the conceit that is human reason.
This barely contained contempt for the film’s audience comes through most clearly in the camera’s obsession with blood. Anytime Jesus sheds his blood, the camera zooms hungrily in for a close-up. We do not see the blood merely shed; we also see it spatter back into the faces of the torturing Roman soldiers, who cackle in Breughel-like transports of sadism. After the scourging, the two Marys take up two cloths and begin sopping up the copious amounts of Jesus’ blood that have literally puddled in pools in the courtyard. As he is mounted on the cross, we see his blood draining out of one of the cross’s nail-holes, much like the oil in an automotive crankcase. The anything-but-subtle subtext here is that this is the propitiary atonement that the Messiah has made for you, the viewer: Behold it, and obey. This is not so much religious allegory as flat-out propagandistic bullying--and lest it leave any room for ambiguity or (God forbid) doubt, Gibson delivers another punitive lesson near the film’s climax to underline what the Passion means for waverers or scoffers that is, quite literally, browbeating. On either side of Jesus at Calvary are two thieves who are also enduring the horrors of crucifixion. One of them--the penitent sinner--allows as to how he has deserved his fate, but that the sinless Jesus should be spared and released. He receives Jesus’ assurance that they shall meet in Paradise when their ordeals are over. But on Jesus’ right hand is an unbelieving thief, who echoes the confident aspersions that Caiaphas cast at Jesus from the foot of the cross. No sooner has he finished than a vulture descends to peck out one of his eyes--a typically Gibsonian gloss on what happens if you wind up on the wrong side of Pascal’s wager.
Chris Lehmann is deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World and author of Revolt of the Masscult. This is the second of a three-part series on marketing God.
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