The Passion of The Christ

Mel Gibson's film of Jesus' murder 2000 years ago has been on the lips and in the blogs of the multitudes these past few weeks. I thought it only made sense for me to weigh in on this topic.

To begin with, I generally don't have a problem with violence in film. The violence in the films like Straw Dogs, Reservoir Dogs, Taxi Driver, Saving Private Ryan, and Blackhawk Down doesn't bother me. Or rather, I can't object to them. I was fairly shocked by the violence in Saving Private Ryan, such that I didn't want to talk about the movie for at least an hour after seeing it. But I knew it was impossible to show the storming of the beaches of Normandy without extreme violence.

There are a handful of movies whose violence actually does bother me. Among these are The Patriot and the remake of Get Carter. I know that when I saw these films, unlike the previous mentioned, I felt emotions and inclinations that I didn't much like. Like Straw Dogs, the violence in these films often intends catharsis and is inspired by vengeance. On the other hand, The Patriot in particular combines its revenge fantasies with cheap emotional manipulation as treacly as the worst of Steven Spielberg (and John Williams, for that matter). This melodrama makes the disproportionate responses of Mel Gibson's character in the Patriot somehow emotionally justified. When I watched that film, I felt myself sinking to emotional level of a reptile, or perhaps the Hulk. English bad. Gibson good. Kill English. Kill English. I felt like I was watching the Two Minutes Hate in 1984.

That is among the reasons I am disturbed by everything I have heard about the new Jesus film. All the signals I'm getting about this film tell me that Gibson has done a bad, bad thing. The purported hourlong torture of Jesus, the scapegoating of the Jews, Mel Gibson's martyrdom campaign on the airwaves- it just looks like a previously rather likeable actor and sometime filmmaker has let his religious zealotry go to his head. I predict that this film, becuase of its subject matter, will have a more destructive or at least distorting influence on Gibson's career than Battlefield Earth did on John Travolta's. That movie was an embarrassing, laughable turkey, but Travolta still has a career. Gibson... the jury's out on that.

In the next day or so I'll cite the Gospels in order to suggest that the brutalization of Jesus portrayed in the film is probably not supported by scripure.