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Thursday, February 26, 2004
Funny you should mention it...
I just got back from a critic's screening of The Passion of the Christ in downtown London at the Odeon (the movie doesn't open here for another month or so). We were handed this folder with production notes in it which quote Mel Gibson as saying, "My ultimate hope is that this story's message of tremendous courage and sacrifice might inspire tolerance, love, and forgiveness." It also says it took seven hours each day to put on James Caviezel's incredibly gory make-up every day. And it shows. For most of the film, Jesus becomes little more than a gory lump that leaves bloody smears all over the place as it gets dragged from one torture chamber to another. He is the ultimate object of redemptive violence.
Its hard not to see this particular take on Jesus as a reflection on the omnipresent violence in our society. By isolating the most action-packed 12 hours of Jesus life, Gibson has created an Xtreme Jesus that fits well along side every other Xtreme product being peddled these days. Jesus's life and teachings are marginal, fragmented into flashbacks that give little context to the horror we see on the screen, let alone a coherent vision of "tolerance, love, and forgiveness." The vicious anger and condemnation we see from the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin seems unwarranted to the point of absurdity and there is no hint of the radical Jesus that threatened the power of the Jewish and Roman authorities.
Though Gibson may have been trying to get beyond the romantic, sterile, and even saccarine portrayals of the crucifiction so common in Jesus movies, he ended up with a portrait of Jesus that is just as dangerous. We end up with a neatly packaged divine scapegoat sent by God to be beaten, punched, kicked, scourged, whipped, gouged and battered for our sins. A bloody sacrifice and nothing more.
posted by Unknown @ 10:07 AM
