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if you're not moved by this movie, you're quite simply not really a Christian.
With all due respect to posters' parental units (who, presumably have no right to reply) this is exactly the attitude to this film that pumps me so full of self-righteous indignation, bile, and sheer, hard-core, fire-and-brimstone fucking fury. This is not a 'Christian' film; this is the mission-statement of a particularly extreme and wacky sub-sect of the Catholic faith. Yeah, I may well be slightly too far into the 'fluffy bunny, be excellent to one another' school of Protestant, low-church Christianity, but there was precious little in this film that represented my faith.
That's fine. I didn't make it and a so-called auteur has no responsibility to any vision other than his/her own. But, to justify the film on this level is to insist that it is judged on artistic terms as you would any other film. As soon as it is no longer presented as an individual creative act and held up as a 'Christian' film, as a religious action or a representative, doctrinal or worse, instructional text then its obsessions, innacuracies, hatred and fucked-up ideologies have to be opposed. I suppose I left the cinema with a similar response to Deva's: where was the love? Where was the teaching, the redemption, the humanity and the divine compassion? All I was left with after two hours of relentless ketchup and the blank stare of Mel's meat-puppet Jesus was a feeling of empty exhaustion. There are many reasons why Christmas remains popular as a secular festival and Easter is stuck as a Bank Holiday/DIY opportunity, but the fact remains that it's trickier and more disturbing, particulary if you're not in the club as it were.
Celebrating the tortured death of an individual is a particularly twisted thing to do and requires justification. My personal understanding of the Easter message is irrelevant in this thread, but the sacrifice is only one critical element, theologically, of a wider story. To focus on the pain, suffering and death, without giving, at the very least, equal weighting to the mystery of divine incarnation, the earthly ministry, the resurrection and the resultant impact on humanity after all of this, is perverse in the extreme. To be sure, after the blood, sweat and tears are done, Mel's Jesus cleans up nicely, but we're presented with precious little explanation for why the hell he went through with it all.
In the end, for me, the film fails upon any scrutiny of its internal structure and support. It is impossible to read it as anything other than a celebration of violence without relying on information from without the work. Not only that, but in order to read the film as the creator claims he intended, the viewer has to carefully prune such sources to those that have been approved. Many other versions of the story of Christ's life (or the end of it) have been idiosyncratic or possessed of a singular view-point, but I cannot think of any that have so singularly failed to support their own purported agenda. If Gibson's intent is a plain, unslanted, 'historical' (and my extreme discomfort at that term can wait for another thread) account of events he believes transpired - and all we are missing is the 'based on a true story' caption at the beginning - then why all the alterations and deviations from the written sources? Why increase the punishment inflicted to Christ's body? Why ignore His actions earlier in Jerusalem so that the authorities' antipathy seems all the more prejudicial? Why flash-back to the cringe-worthy Spielbergian early-years rather than any of the canonical stories? Why not include any of the teachings of His years on the road or make them unintelligible when pictured? What's the Devil doing in this film?
The only answer I can come up with is that Gibson's faith is truly an empty vessel of hate. Jesus rising to his feet to take more punishment from the soldiers has far more in common with Rocky raising his battered face to take one last shot at Apollo Creed, than turning the other cheek in pacifistic love. To leech guilt away from the occupying Roman authorities because not to do so could be read as an attack on contempoary America (whether conscious or more-likely not) is to deny vital tenets of the teaching supposedly central to the story. The divine example we are asked to follow in this version of the Passion is to 'take it like a (Son-of-)Man'; that hollow, bloody machismo and pointless suffering are both the result of the machinations of the forces of darkness and, literally, a path to redemption. That these forces are personified both as a tempting, androgenous figure of pure evil, and as a conniving cabal of Jewish caricatures operating behind the scenes is deeply disturbing. However, what shook me most, was the way that someone had taken a story that, to me, is a deeply-personal tale of sublime, almost incomprehensible love and shrunk it to a squalid romp through violence and blinkered, impotent hate. All sound and fury, it signified nothing. |
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