[In keeping with the Lenten season, we shall be posting some older essays.
This one dates from 2004, when Mel Gibson's movie came out.]
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Suzanne & I just saw “The Passion”. It was hard to stroll into the cineplex with an innocent eye, as our ears rang with the advance commotion: everything from the First Things reviewers placing the movie literally in the company of the Allegri “Miserere” and the Divina Commedia, to Roger Ebert calling it “the most violent film I have ever seen” (suggesting, improbably, that he hasn’t seen many films), Slate calling it “Mel Gibson’s bloody mess”, and The New Republic calling it (with delirious untruth) “deeply cynical”.
The unavoidable question, which faces every citizen every time he nears a water cooler, is: Is it anti-Semitic?
It’s supposed to be a movie you either love or loathe; I walked out thinking it the best movie in Aramaic I’ve seen all year (but who knows what March might bring). And one would not, I submit, were one somehow to walk in like the ideal juror, entirely without predisposition, having just that afternoon returned from an extended visit to the outer planets and not had time to check a newspaper, pick out precisely anti-Semitism or the lack of it as the issue on which this movie turns. That focus stems more from what viewers bring to the table, than what the film itself sets out for us to eat.
To see this, try a little thought-experiment.
There are only three characters in the movie who, from their own spontaneous goodness and not from any contact with charisma or favors received, come forth to ease Christ’s sufferings: the Virgin, Veronica, and Pilate’s wife. All are women. And all the bestial people are men. Now, suppose that the director was a feisty feminist, and the advance buzz had been that the movie was Amazonian. Same movie, same Rorschach blot. But we’d be having a different (and equally pointless) debate.
Or, suppose the director were a Catholic Ukrainian. Now, the Ukraine is currently being torn, as was the Church as a whole in history, by schism, Roman versus Eastern Orthodox. Advance buzz: Would the director somehow smuggle this controversy into the movie? And lo, the soundtrack is in *Latin* (not Greek, as some reviewers have objected), and the Sanhedrin, good Lord, not like any rabbis we’ve ever seen, Caiaphas looks straight out of Byzantium! Obviously the Vatican fix is in!
For that matter, suppose the director was actually *Jewish*, and the buzz was: he’s slyly made a movie to confound anti-Semites. You could find blobs in the exact same blot to support even this thesis. For: The first person we see on-screen being converted from hostility to awe at Jesus is Malchus, a Jew; and the one who physically most suffers for Jesus, and risks his own life in his defense, is another Jew, Simon of Cyrene, who carries the cross, and whose role is blown up way beyond the bare mention in the Gospels (indeed he has one of the more loquacious speaking parts in this laconic movie). The Virgin Mary speaks little beyond a line from the Passover Seder. Jesus himself we experience verbally almost exclusively through the medium of a Semitic language. But above all, the movie goes out of its way to depict the trial and condemnation as the action of a cabal, not of Jews as a whole nor even the of rabbinate. During the trial, which is represented as taking place under cover of darkness (pace Luke 22:66, “When day broke…”), one Jew objects that the whole thing is a farce, with contradictory testimony, and another objects that not all the religious authorities who should be are present. This is not scriptural; indeed, Mark 14:54 and 15:1, Matthew 26:59 specify “the whole Sanhedrin”. So who is responsible for the terrible events? Visually the movie has an answer: Satan, a riveting figure, ever gliding behind the scenes, neither Jewish nor Gentile, neither female nor male, and in this context, very much the director’s own invention.
In recent years, movies have become increasingly self-referential and incestuous (now that there are at last many decades of film history to refer to, and now that the general public, with access to vast DVD collections, is in a better position to actually get the references). “The Passion” does not come from this world. It’s less a traditional film than a passion play, a ritual re-enactment. If you weren’t well versed in the Gospels, most of it wouldn’t even make sense, starting from the very first scene: Who is this guy in the garden, and why is he so upset? Allusions are elliptical: we see a flashback of the episode of the Woman Taken in Adultery, with no depiction of the accusation (let alone of the infraction) nor the defense, just the telling strange memorable detail of Jesus doodling with his finger in the sand. Bible mavens will see, in the mise en scene of Judas’ hanging, a reference to Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, and perhaps an ironic echo of Samson, saved by the jawbone of an ass; but to the general audience, it must seem like a touch from Sergio Leone. Critics have dwelt on the extended flagellation scene (which doubtless felt even more extended for the prisoner), but there’s another emphatic and violent motif which is not so much in the cinematic tradition (several movies have had a scourging or a caning as their physical high-point): Christ falling with his cross, not once but three times, with a boom and in slow motion. What’s that about? To understand it you practically have to be Catholic: the movie is patiently replaying each of the Stations of the Cross. The movie is trying to do something -- much as celebration of the Mass does something -- and not be just an artistic effect. Quite in keeping with this is the lack of star actors, or a spate of TV commercials touting the film. And to make it, the director put several million of his own money into the collection plate. You have to respect that.
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For a strangely affecting melding of sight and sound, click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5WOGaYUQWg&feature=related
