There's an interesting article at TNR by Paul Frederickson wondering how Mel Gibson sold what is essentially a late Medieval Passion Play to Sunbelt Protestants:
All of which brings us to Mel Gibson's most recent effort, The Passion of the Christ. Pumping up the gore--computer-generated flying flesh, Hollywood make-up artistry--Gibson has pulled off a cross-marketing coup. He has taken this now somewhat old-fashioned, quintessentially Roman Catholic fixation on blood and pain, and sold it to Sun Belt Protestants. It seems likely that at no prior point in U.S. history have so many Baptists known the date of Ash Wednesday.
The Christ that Gibson is selling is not the Christ of the first-century scriptures, though elements of his story are drawn from them. The first-century Christ, presented primarily in the four gospels, redeemed not through his suffering, but through his death and resurrection, which promised his return. The evangelists mediated historical traditions about Jesus' life and teachings, interpreting these through their own understanding of Jewish scriptures. Their meditations on ancient sacred texts especially shaped their presentations of the edges of Jesus' life--his birth and his death. The many narrative details of the gospels' passion stories deliberately echo various verses from the prophets and the psalms. Their point: that Jesus died, and was raised, according to the Scriptures. The matching of event to ancient prophecy established, for the evangelists and for their communities, the authority of their stories.
Gibson missed the evangelists' point. His opening screen flashes a verse from Isaiah 53: "He was wounded for our transgressions; by his stripes we are healed." What served as prophetic authorization for the gospels' proclamation, Gibson takes as an invitation to explore, in lurid and lingering detail, how a human body would look if pulped, pummeled, and flayed. Part of this orientation comes from the Catholicism of his childhood. Part of it, as he has repeatedly claimed, comes from the visions of an early nineteenth-century stigmatic nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich. (Knowing what my catechism classes were like in twentieth-century Rhode Island, I can only imagine what hers were like in eighteenth-century Westphalia.) Part of it, of course, is just Gibson's favorite visual vernacular, on display from Mad Max through Braveheart and beyond.
Thus Gibson's Christ, a theological figure whose origins lie in late medieval Europe, saves not through dying so much as through endless, unspeakable, unbearable suffering. That's the core of Gibson's movie. The rest is window-dressing. The costuming, like the music, is lushly theatrical. The bad guys wear black, their Jewishness coded by prayer shawls, big noses, and bad teeth. The Jewish soldiers who form the arresting party look like visiting Romulan dignitaries, or extras from the chorus of Nabucco. The faces of the two Marys are framed by nun-like veils. (I half expected Monica Belucci to whip out a rosary along the Stations of the Cross.) And Gibson's much-touted use of ancient languages, like the high quality of his celluloid gore, was a nod to verisimilitude, not real history. Pilate chatted in Aramaic; Jesus (at this point in the movie, I confess, I groaned aloud) in perfect Church Latin.
How did so many Protestants end up buying into such late medieval Catholic stuff? In part, because of the movie's narrative blandness. Relentlessly visual, its story and characterization are slight. It has no plot. It has no character development. We are never told why Jesus has to die, or why Caiaphas so much wants him to die, or why Jerusalem's Jews so insist on his death. The film is actually a series of biblical movie set pieces, strung together with lots of slow-motion sequences and spongy music. (And some shots--Roman troops marching briskly in formation; Pilate from his dias trying to reason with a Jewish mob--simply can no longer work effectively after Monty Python's Life of Brian.) What makes Gibson's movie weak as story, however, might be precisely what makes it so effective as a commercial inter-denominational hit. Viewers without a particular theological orientation may well be slightly bored when they are not nauseated by the relentless bloodletting. But viewers of quite various theological orientations can all find support in Gibson's tableaux for whatever message they want, because they are the ones filling in all the blanks that he left.
Gibson's marketing targeted evangelical communities, and he hired the marketing mavens of Christian industry to push his film as an act of religious commitment. He shone the light of his celebrity upon these churches, asking humbly that they help him spread the truth of the gospel. And he also positioned himself as a pious warrior pitted against secular, sinful--indeed anti-Christian--Hollywood.
But Gibson himself also crossed over, reinventing himself in the TV tropes of the born-again. His script, he maintained, was simply and directly based on the Bible (sola scriptura, in the language of the Reformation). His message was all about Jesus, love, forgiveness. He himself had been a sinner, lost but now found, slave but now free. He was just a regular guy, called to witness to what he had to believe, because it's just what's in the Bible. In brief, to sell both himself and his film, Gibson morphed into a Protestant-style pre-Vatican II Catholic. And, amazingly, it worked. Who would have thought that so many Protestants would so enthusiastically endorse such a medieval Catholic Passion play, assembled and tirelessly promoted by a man who believes that even his Episcopalian wife could have difficulty getting into heaven unless she converts to his church? Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
tnr.com |
