THE CRUCIFIXION OF
MEL GIBSON
A REVIEW OF
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
by Chad Powers
No work of art is frozen with an absolute "meaning." The interpretation of any art creation is merely the realm of shared -- or unshared -- experience and belief systems between creator and audience. Of course interpretive meaning is not necessarily the same between different cultural, and subcultural groups. Or even individuals. Meaning can also change over time. Whatever the case, each individual brings his/her own experiential realities and interpretive world view towards the negotiation of any artwork's ultimate significance. In essence, per the broadest cultural landscape, any work of art's meaning is subject to a war between contesting ideologies, whatever they may be.
That said, I'm still going to tell you what this movie is about.
There are two quite distinct realms that inform Mel Gibson's 2004 film. The first is the celluloid story itself, which depicts Gibson's version of a Christian icon, with some poetic license. The second is the modern social and political context wherein powerful elements in mass culture struggle to dictate the movie's meaning on their terms, and their terms only.
Let's start with the elementals of this story, devoid of the tightening net of expressly political content. That we'll look at later.
If there is anything a majority of viewers should be able to agree upon, The Passion of the Christ is about intense suffering and sacrifice. The viewer need not hold allegiance to expressly Christian dogma, or even know the details of it all, to understand this in the film. Take it literally, or take it as fable, the story of Christ is a story of compassion. A man, Christ, surrenders his life, in a horribly torturous manner, on behalf of all other human beings. It is an affirmation of the human community, albeit -- paradoxically -- via death. But Jesus' brutal end is an affirmation which parallels in no small sense the act of giving birth -- blood and all. (In this film, mother Mary's face, smeared with Christ's blood, repeatedly echoes this theme). And in Christian tradition (and Gibson's film), with Christ's resurrection this (re)birth is explicit as a transcendence of materialist anchors and delusions. ("My kingdom is not the world of Caesar's.") This is the core terrain of the tale that Mel Gibson explores. There are plenty of tangents of course, including explicitly religious dogma (not the least that Christ is alleged to be "son of God"), but this noble expression of "love" via personal sacrifice for the welfare of all others is the heart of the thing. For even the anti-religious skeptic (or bigot), the story of Christ is -- at the very least -- a legend about altruism.
That's the story's baseline. So how does Gibson deal with it, on film?
The Passion of the Christ begins like a dream in prelude to a growing nightmare wherein odd shrieks, mob monsters, semi-hysterical characters, and brief camera whooshes (past contorted peripheral faces) highlight a horrifically surreal scenario wherein Jesus staggers to his final demise. The Passion of the Christ is a giant wound of hurt and vulnerability.
Panning down from the moon and moody cloud formations, the camera first approaches Jesus from behind, in a misty grove. He is soon betrayed here to Roman soldiers by Judas, and this is where Gibson chooses to start his own version of this traditional story. Among his symbolic innovations is the physical embodiment of what we presume to be "evil" -- a somewhat androgynous woman who leers about from the periphery of various scenes, underscoring her/its influential (almost monitoring) omnipresence. She seems to be intended as part of the Christian Good-Evil dialectic: a negative female/mother symbol in contradistinction to Jesus' mother, Mary, and, for that matter, God, "the father."
Much has been already written by Gibson's professional critical enemies about the "violence" and "sadism" of Gibson's film. The movie is indeed laden heavy with dripping blood, wounds, welts, and repeated flagellation. (This focus is not unique to Christianity, of course. Shi'ite Islam, for instance, commemorates yearly the death of their own revered martyr, Hossain, sometimes by men beating their chests with chains and razor blades in communal allegiance to their own tradition of bloody suffering). While most Hollywood movies feature violence as titillating, voyeuristic, sensational, and gratuitous, Gibson's very heavy dose of agony seemed absolutely justifiable. Why? Aside from the fact that this is the popular understanding of the brutal event by traditional Christian dogma, such intensive violence is the natural boiling of the central premise of the "legend" of Christ. If a single man is to be burdened upon his physical body with ALL THE SINS OF HUMANKIND, it would seem that this would be a rather seriously hurtful undertaking. To say the least.
Such agonized suffering of Christ renders in the movie viewer (let alone religious believer) a confrontation with the very essence of human hopelessness. Here, Christ, lying on the ground in a puddle of blood, being struck yet again and again by whips, is the consummate loser. He has no hope against the soldiers and mobs against him. He is starkly alone in his predicament. It is human loneliness at its most pathetic. No one will save him. Christ knows that. And the viewer knows that. Who of us has not felt this kind of overwhelming defeat? A completely vulnerable Christ, sprawled out on the pavement, completely vulnerable to endless abuse, is DEFEAT's great metaphor. And from this bloody pulp -- once a human body -- arises our very human hopes and dreams. What arises is faith. We all face it in our darkest moments: Dear God, all of our miserable sufferings surely must mean something.
Spiritual seekers of any avenue inevitably face mystifying disdain and disillusionment, for life is truly rife with continuous pain, suffering, and violence. The big fish eats the little fish in a potentially horrific (depending where you reside in the predatory link) food chain. This is the essence of life, always feeding on itself, always causing pain up and down the line. Now, why must it work this way? And herein is the riddle of the eons, and wherein many of the great religions, for instance Buddhism, focus their contemplative energies.
Now, these are some of the fundamental currents of this religiously "fundamentalist" film. They are transcendent ideas, abstracts, above and beyond the specifics of the social and political world, and even passing beyond the limitations of any expressly religious boundary.
This brings us, however, to the next interpretive level of Mel Gibson's movie: the current social and political American milieu which also informs its meaning.
Wherein in centuries past "art" was largely the expression of institutionalized religious motifs, celebrating tradition, in modern Western culture the great "artist" of worthy acclaim is widely heralded as an ultimate truthsayer against social convention. The truly dedicated artist is expected to war against the cultural grain, destroy antiquated views of the world, and expose mainstream social conventions as merely hollow follies and foibles. In a word, the modern artist (so often heroized as tortured and afflicted by in-house ghosts and demons) is a prophetic figure. Yes, a form of messiah. This has important resonance to Mel Gibson. In Western culture, we live in a society that has reversed course. Wherein once religious faith and organizations dominated the realm of popular culture, today's most important and influential institutions are avidly irreligious and actively subvert any expressly religious enterprise. In this context, Mel Gibson's courage and sacrifice in bringing his movie about Christ against so many odds reiterates himself, of course, as a prophetic Christ figure.
As seen in the news for months now, there has been a massive propaganda and defamation campaign -- largely from the Jewish American community -- to censor this film on grounds that it is "anti-Semitic." What the Jewish Lobby has succeeded in doing, however, much to their shock and chagrin, is to implant itself -- socially and politically -- into the very thematic weave of Mel Gibson's movie, underscoring a theme that has long been dead but -- thanks to their hyper-aggressive actions in attempting to defame and censor this movie -- is now revived.
When the viewer watches the mob of hysterical Pharisees (corrupt Jewish leaders of Jesus' era) calling for Christ's death in the movie, what does he see (if he's been watching the news at all lately)? He sees Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League calling for the head of Mel Gibson. He sees Rabbi Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal spitting at Christ (Gibson) as he drags his cross along the cobblestone. He sees yet another, then another, rabbi with public forum adjusting Gibson with a crown of thorns. The innocent Passion of Christ viewer now invariably notes in the very cloth of hysterical Jews in Mel Gibson's movie equally hysterical modern Jewish rabbis, editorialists, media pundits, and organizations of all sorts TODAY demanding changes and concessions in Mel Gibson's vision as a Christian and artist. Bizarrely, these modern Jews have succeeded in creating crystal clear closure between the ancient Jews who killed Christ (and Jewish convention has ALWAYS accepted responsibility for the execution of Jesus) and the Jews who very much seek to do the same today.
Gibson's movie about suffering and human universalism has been declared everything (by mainstream -- mostly Jewish -- movie critics) from "anti-Semitic" to "fascistic" to a sadomasochistic playground that will attract an audience of twisted gays.
Now, this all makes for a very interesting scenario, does it not? Mel Gibson is a famous movie actor. He made a fortune working in Hollywood, which was founded by Jews and remains dominated by them to this very day. Yet depicting Christianity (the traditional Jewish nemesis) in a positive light is a serious taboo in Tinseltown and Gibson had to pay out of his own pocket to express his (subversive to Judeocentric Hollywood) Christian spiritual vision.
So what has happened? Mel Gibson's spiritual movie about compassion, altruism, human universalism, and suffering in a Christian context has become a central point in today's Culture Wars which pits Jewish materialism, Jewish censorship, Jewish power, Jewish narcissism, and anti-religious hedonistic nihilism throughout mass culture versus anyone who resists such a Vision: those who yearn for a public communion of the spiritual.
The astounding thing is that coordinated Jewish political and propagandized assault against Mel Gibson has inevitably underscored traditional Jewish hatred and disdain for Christ and his followers, highlighting the whole historical continuum. Jewish censorial hysteria has taken a movie that has really very little (in the Big Picture) to do with Jews and foregrounded them via modern Jewish narcissism into a movie that they have declared to be CENTRALLY about Jewish victimhood. And, hence, The Passion of the Christ has become exactly the very public vehicle for anti-Jewish hostility that they sought to censor. In other words, today's Jewish Lobby has managed to assail a movie about human suffering and universalistic love and reconstruct it into one about incessant Jewish complaint about Christianity -- represented in a direct line from Jesus Christ to Mel Gibson.
In the most profoundly spiritual sense, The Passion of the Christ has nothing to do with Jews whatsoever. In the current social and political sense, however, the movie now serves as a historical mirror to underscore the fact that nothing has really changed over the millennia in Jewish demand and anti-Christian sentiment. In the modern political sense, The Passion of the Christ is a very clear echo about the powerful Jewish Lobby's efforts to reshape everyone else's' thinking to suit them -- be it the nature of Christianity or the nature of modern apartheid Israel.
Let us not forget the essence of the Christ story -- Mel Gibson's or otherwise. Jesus exited the Jewish fold. He was a rebel against the Jewish Power of the day. He shut the door behind him. The Jewish community, to this very day upset with their most famous blasphemer, insists upon opening it and kicking Jesus down again.
As much as Christians have strained not to notice it, and as much as they've worked to turn the proverbial cheek to the unending blows, too many Jews have clearly demonstrated that they still have the need to crucify him.
Crucify who? Christ or Mel Gibson?
It doesn't really matter. The relentless attackers drive the same hateful spike into both of them. |
