April 3, 2004

Will Mel Gibson’s Biblical epic send us from the cinema to church? John Carroll plays devil’s advocate.

It is particularly surprising that this Jesus film should have stormed the box offices. The Passion in its original Greek means suffering, and Mel Gibson’s film projects suffering in its most extreme physical form. Its central and enduring image is of systematic and sadistic bodily torture, from a flogging that rips chunks of skin out of the body to a close-up of an eye being pecked out. There is negligible focus on psychic or spiritual pain.

The success is the more surprising in that the very mention of Jesus Christ for decades in the modern secular West has driven most to roll their eyes and switch off. In its third week in the US, The Passion took almost double its nearest rival and became the most financially successful independent film ever. In Australia its success has been similar.

Anecdotal evidence here suggests all age groups are attending, and particularly those in their 20s, from star athletes to devout Christians. Women note with surprise that boyfriends are interested in what they imagined might be resisted as a “girlie” film.

The only common feature of responses I have heard is that they are unpredictable and strong, indeed usually extreme. The span is from “brilliant” and “extraordinary” to “sick” and “barbaric”. Some have cried; some have described nearly fainting; some have walked out.

Success may be partly attributed to shrewd pre-release marketing. Advance viewings were made available to selected ministers, from many denominations, and particularly those of a more fundamentalist bent. Gibson correctly judged that they would spread a positive word.

Some rabbis also gained early access and they fell for the trap of flaring up an “anti-Semitism” controversy, stoking anticipation about the film. Secular critics and the media were invited to view only the night before release. Gibson rightly foresaw that the secular intellectuals would prove hostile – in my view, they have underestimated the work.

“The film dwells almost pornographically on human sacrifice as some sort of spiritual purgative.” But media hype is not enough on its own to fill theatres. While it can provide the publicity petrol, it still requires a smouldering fire to explode into life. The fire this time may indicate a seismic shift in the culture.

That there is a crisis of meaning in Western societies is not new – expressed by individuals dissatisfied with me-me-me consumerism, in desperate need for something higher in which to believe, which might give shape and direction to their lives. We are familiar with the symptoms – from the New Age to militant environmentalism, and even including the Australian affinity for the beach, with its intimations of transcendence.

What is startling is the renewed interest in the death of Western culture’s once-commanding teacher. A shift marked in recent “culture wars” in this country may be being extended. The post-1960s decades were typified in the cultural elites by self-denigrating and anti-Western questioning. The current swing indicates a renewed search for more collectively uplifting narratives – of character strengths and succouring national stories.

The box-office success of The Passion suggests a new open-minded curiosity about Jesus, who he was, what he did and what he represented (as does the world best-seller popularity of The Da Vinci Code).

The film itself is the best cinematic representation by far of the Jesus story for the past 50 years. The predecessors are all unwatchable, for the simple reason that their Jesus is implausible.

George Stevens, director of the seminal western, Shane, made it his career ambition to film this story. The result was The Greatest Story Ever Told – four hours of epic tedium. Film buffs of a more nouvelle vague European orientation will cite Pasolini’s black-and-white Gospel According to St Matthew. It is notable for its angular, mannered Jesus declaiming an interminable Sermon on the Mount into the camera.

Then there was Martin Scorsese’s sordid Last Temptation of Christ . More recently, Jesus of Montreal took a fertile idea of an actor collecting a cast together to act in a Passion play, and finding they begin to identify with the characters they are playing. Once again, however, the problem is a yawning credibility gap, in this case between the bohemian actor and the blueprint.

None of this is surprising. We need only to recall the thousands of portraits of Christ by the Old Masters. I know only three that conjure a convincing presence: Donatello’s Christ on the Cross statue in Padua, Caravaggio’s Jesus Calling Matthew in Rome, and Poussin’s Last Supper in Edinburgh.

Even the most successfully popular 20th-century retelling of the story, Jesus Christ Superstar, gains its force from secondary characters, especially Mary Magdalene. Jesus screeches like a hysterical teenager.

Gibson’s Jesus is passably convincing. This is mainly due to the strategy of making him a passive victim. He is not required to project himself as charismatic teacher and messiah – indeed the few scenes, interrupting his torture, of him preaching the Sermon on the Mount find the actor struggling for authenticity.

That this Jesus speaks Aramaic helps add an aura of mysterious distance and avoids problems with clanging modern accents.

The film’s weakness is that it depends on a medieval, flagellation theory of salvation. The assumption is that redemption, enlightenment, spiritual awakening – whatever terminology is used – depend on metaphorically flogging the body into extinction. Loss of normal consciousness follows, due to the unbearable pain of nails through hands and feet – depicted here with a gruesome close-up realism only possible in modern film.

Then the spirit will rise from the corruptions of the flesh and mind. We return to an old Western dualism of spirit and flesh, the ascetic view that the spiritual is of its nature compromised by the sensual. The body and its pleasures must be whipped into extinction. The film dwells almost pornographically on human sacrifice as some sort of spiritual purgative.

The main polarity set up in The Passion is between the modern civilised world – in which there is compassion, justice and order – and the barbaric past – a jungle without law in which terror and chaos ruled. Most viewers will leave this film with one overwhelming reaction: thank God I was not born into those horrific times. The only people trying to make this nightmare world more humane in a modern sense are Jesus and his small circle – mainly women – and the Roman elite, represented by Pontius Pilate and his wife.

Conversely, the Jewish leaders encourage and legitimise torture and anarchic mob rage. The film may leave a residual undercurrent identifying any tribalism with the primitive and barbaric. If there is an anti-Jewish resonance it is here.

Though Gibson is not anti-Semitic in any marked sense. Some Jewish leaders dissent at the trial of Jesus. Judas, the Jew with the blackest stigma in Western culture, as cultural critic George Steiner has noted, is not cast as archetypal evil, but a weak, ordinary man who gives in to envy, then regrets. Gibson cleverly imagines him as hounded out of his mind by street urchins doubling as little devils.

Above all, Simon Cyrene is movingly shown as the ideal of he who resists Jesus, then comes to believe, carrying the cross and trying to protect him. The film identifies Simon positively and very much as “the Jew”.

American rabbis have, in the main, concluded that the film is anti-Jewish but not anti-Semitic – hostile, but not racist in the sense of implying innate corruption or evil. The judgement is sound. But this is hardly a criticism, given that the four canonical accounts of the life of Jesus are all harsh on “the Jews” as a collective – and pointedly so in the most philosophically profound version, that of John.

Gibson gives some sense of the key role that Christianity has played in Western history in the long and slow struggle to civilise. The most moving figure in the film is Mary the mother – depicted as the archetype of compassion. The modern audience identifies with her grief, as she winces in dignified, heart-breaking torment at what is inflicted on her son.

A simple formula with three elements is being proposed: brutish sadistic soldiers, suffering passive Jesus, compassionate mother. Without Jesus’s sacrifice we would still be subject to male violence and its ensuing anarchy. In a revolutionary ethos shift, Mary becomes heroine.

Many church leaders from the Pope down and across are reported to have endorsed The Passion. With Protestants this is perplexing, given that this film is ultra-conservatively Catholic, lavishly replete with such relics as the shroud of Turin and such ritual markers as the stations of the cross. The stage is set with precisely what Martin Luther and John Calvin threw out the window 500 years ago as idolatrous – the gaudy magic and glittering hocus-pocus of Vatican religious vaudeville, albeit painted more tastefully by Gibson.

Yet it is understandable that, in the relentlessly secular modern world, the churches will support anything that takes Jesus seriously in the cultural mainstream. Hollywood commands that central channel.

One suspects here, however, that the true signal is that clergy have given up their core task of retelling their big story in a way that speaks to the times. They hope Gibson will do it for them. Given this context in the saga of Western Christendom – the failure of nerve and mission by the churches – it is intriguing that Gibson should have resorted to about as extreme a pre-Humanist, pre-Reformation – in short, pre-modern – version as one might imagine.

Will it succeed in the way Gibson hopes, to convert outsiders? A serious supporting argument can be mounted from the fact that three of the most interesting films of the past decade – Pulp Fiction, Fight Club and The Gladiator – have all had extreme and insistent violence as a part of their dramatic tool kit. It would hold that the modern West has become so desensitised that it needs ever-greater shocks for it to feel anything – this is the pornography model, analogous to those cases of psychosis in which victims stick lighted cigarettes into their arms to test whether they feel at all. The grander thesis would point to a decadent culture, with collapsing beliefs and morals, ushering in a psychological regression to a more brutal, medieval sensibility.

If The Passion becomes so influential that it leads to a refilling of the churches, the cultural pessimists, and Gibson, will have been proved right. I doubt this outcome. In all three films – and especially Fight Club and The Gladiator – violence is subservient to a strong narrative with a driving moral and metaphysical core. By contrast, the violence in The Passion is overwhelming.

By further contrast, none of the Gospels dwell on the horror of crucifixion. The most dramatically potent of all, Mark, simply notes that “they” crucified him, while shifting focus onto the psychological, existential impact on Jesus of being abandoned by almost everybody, including his own disciples, and relentlessly mocked. Mark follows the basic story-telling law of working indirectly by suggestion and enigmatically.

The Passion fails, crucially, at what in the Jewish tradition is called midrash. That is the method of retelling fundamental stories and their classical themes in ways that speak to the new times. Every new generation has to midrash its stories. This film reverts to the Middle Ages, it lacks spiritual force, it does not uplift, and it leaves little sense of who this extraordinary man was and why he changed Western history.

Gibson instructed his cinematographer that he wanted his film to look like the works of Caravaggio, whose paintings he finds beautiful. A Caravaggio exhibition opened at the NGV within a week of The Passion. The comparison is instructive.

None of Caravaggio’s great redemptive works is included in the exhibition – for instance The Call of St Matthew, which opens up powerful insight into the universal story of vocation, of an ordinary individual stumbling upon his mission in life, and resisting it, but the exhibition contains three redemptive works by others that are, unlike Gibson’s film, accessible to modern sensibilities: a Caravaggesque Peter’s Denial, a De la Tour Magdalene, and Cavallino’s Virgin Annunciate.

The box-office success of The Passion signals that the culture has become more receptive, virtually on the instant, to its own formative “Dreaming” story. While this film is unlikely to suddenly fill churches, in demonstrating a renewed hunger for this story, it may prepare the way, John the Baptist like, for a retelling of the life of Jesus in a style more likely to speak to the modern West.

John Carroll is professor of sociology at La Trobe University and author of The Western Dreaming.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/03/1080941713736.html