"What is truth?"
A review of The Passion of the Christ
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ cannot be reviewed as a movie. The fact that it generated such controversy, hence publicity, before it was ever released, is an indication that this movie can only be understood as a social phenomenon. In blurring the lines that demarcate entertainment, commerce, and religious belief, Mad Mel has confounded religionists and secularists alike. So far so good.
Love it or hate it, the only way to understand this movie is to see it as a play within a play. The real drama is in watching us, the Twenty First century public, and how we react. Some of us have had our faith renewed, others are left with an empty cup, and still others are determined not to watch it at all. Not since the OJ Simpson trial have so many had such strong opinions about something they knew nothing about.
The key to understanding this movie as a movie is to realize that it is not an historical drama but a passion play on film. In this regard those elements, which at first seem strongest, the ones done most artfully, are the ones that cause the movie to fail in its purpose. Mr Gibson and his very talented crew went to great lengths to create an historically authentic milieu. From the dry, stony hills to the mechanical details of crucifixion, the movie offers a convincing window on first century Palestine.
More than anything it is the sound that creates the time machine experience. The entire dialogue is spoken in now dead languages. This takes Jesus back beyond the English of King James, beyond even the Koine Greek, all the way back to the exotic, and even dangerous, sounding Aramaic of first century Judea. How disturbing to be reminded that Jesus looked and sounded more like Osama bin Laden than Billy Graham.
The emotional impact of exotic ancient languages is multiplied by John Debney’s sound track. It interweaves new age heroicism, European devotional music and haunting strains of middle eastern chant and acoustic. No, Dorothy, we are not in Sunday School anymore.
All this artfully executed realism would constitute a masterful background for a movie that intended to depict an historical account of a first century Nazarene, subtle and complex, who changed a world, which itself was subtle and complex. But that is not Mr Gibson’s purpose. Subtlety and complexity are not his tools.
The Passion of the Christ is a passion play on film that depicts the suffering of God in a man’s body. As a passion play, it is not really concerned with personal or historical reality; it has no place for subtlety or complexity.
A passion play is an archetypal re-creation of a divine drama in which the audience participates in the divine re-creation and is itself re-created in the experience. This is not only a completely legitimate religious art form, but represents an interesting return to the very roots of drama.
The essential failure of the movie is in the director’s attempt to graft this archetypal re-creation on top of a super-realistic backdrop. This confuses the audience as to purpose and is ultimately the source of many of the movie’s attendant controversies, including violence, commercialism, and anti-Semitism.
In this regard Mr Gibson could have learned a thing or two from the unlikely hippie passion play, Jesus Christ Superstar. This movie begins overtly by revealing itself as a play; this relieves the audience of the burden of maintaining a belief in historical accuracy and liberates it to experience the characters as pure archetypes.
Conversely, The Last Temptation of Christ, the story of a man wrestling with God, would have greatly benefited from Jim Caviezel’s convincing Jesus, and Pilate would have seemed so much like David Bowie if he had spoken Latin.
Mel Gibson’s method is pretty obvious: he wants to shock us with suffering. He intends to overwhelm us with emotions of horror, pity, perhaps guilt, and certainly humility. In this way he hopes to restore the power of a story that has grown effete by virtue of its familiarity. He literally wants to restore the blood to a story grown pale.
It doesn’t work. His torturers all have an array of implements at their disposal, but Mr Gibson has only one: the big hammer. And he uses it to beat his audience senseless throughout the entire movie. Horror, like sensuality, is sharpest when left to the imagination. More violence does not equal more horror; in fact the opposite.
I don’t think the movie was anti-Semitic. This is a tough charge to prove. True, that the bad guys and fence sitters are all Jews, but then so are the hero and all the good guys. Caiaphas and the mob he whips up are certainly the villains in this movie— just as they are in the Gospels. The concern might be that the condemnation of the priests indicates a condemnation of the entire religious tradition. But what religion could pass this test? Fortunately, religion is truer than her priests (and God is truer than her religions.)
This anti-Semitic suspicion is augmented by the movie’s awkward attempt to morph a passion play onto an historical background. If the movie were purely an historical depiction of first century Judea, then the director might have attempted to portray the priests with more subtlety. Caiaphas could have been portrayed as genuinely, but tragically, concerned with the commonwealth, as when John has him say, "For the good of the nation, one man must die."
Conversely, if the movie presented itself as a passion play, pure and simple, then the priests could have remained two dimensional, but they would have been archetypes. The audience would have recognized that the priests were generic; they might have as easily been Christians or Muslims.
This movie did not inspire me, and from a strictly personal view that is how I ultimately judge it. The phenomenon that it inspired, however, is much more powerful and interesting. Those who watched it and even those who did not, were challenged to wrestle with their beliefs— and perhaps even talk about it.
More ominously, the entire phenomenon, the movie and its passionate response, seems to be one more indicator that the reasonable middle ground is slowly shrinking under our feet. We have become a whole nation of Pontius Pilates: rationalists and sure of our power. We find ourselves growing powerless in a world whose changes we do not understand. Slowly, and not without pain, it dawns on us that his question becomes our question: "What is Truth?"
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