Entertainment & Sports: February 2004 Archives

I just saw The Passion of the Christ, and I don't have anything to say about it.

Update:
Ok, I've thought about the movie more, and now I have a few things to say. This won't be a review, and it will certainly contain spoilers -- if you haven't seen the movie yet and don't want any of the details given away, stop reading.

First of all, none of the violence really connected with me. I've never been hurt like that, I can't imagine what it would be like, and it was just so far beyond my experience that it seemed surreal. It's unlikely that Jesus was scourged as severely as was depicted, because no one could survive that kind of massive pain and blood loss without going into shock and passing out. I don't doubt there were sadistic Roman torturers who might have done such a thing, I just don't think it happened quite that way in this instance because he survived long enough to be crucified.

The two scenes that impacted me the most weren't directly related to the violence, but to two peripheral character I could really identify with. The first was in the temple when Jesus was being judged and Peter denied to the crowd that he knew him. Jesus looked up at him at just the right moment, and I could feel the same shame inside that Peter must have felt. How many times have I been in the same situation? Denying Christ by my words or actions whenever circumstances get a bit uncomfortable?

The second scene was when the Romans conscripted Simon of Cyrene to help Jesus carry his cross. Simon was understandably reluctant to get mixed up in the apparently awful affair and yelled to the watching crowd, "Just remember I'm an innocent man, forced to carry the cross of a condemned man!" This precisely wrong assessment drove home to me the reality of the situation. Jesus was the only innovent man there, and he was carrying the cross for all of us.

I'll probably go see the movie again in a while, but not immediately. It's well conceived and well executed, and accurate enough to give a viewer familiar with the back-story a full appreciation of Jesus' last hours. Some of the sequences were unnnecessarily long for notably Catholic reasons -- for instance, Mr. Gibson dragged on Jesus' march to Golgotha so that he could include all seven stations of the cross. I'm sure there were other instances as well that I couldn't recognize, since I'm not Catholic, but they didn't detract much from the movie.

The Passion made me think, and I'm not done thinking about it yet. I may have more to say later.

I'm not a big fan of government censorship, but people who like Howard Stern who say "if you don't like it, turn it off" are missing an important point.

Stern routinely criticizes the government's indecency policies, saying they are arbitrary and fail to reflect that anyone who finds his material objectionable can simply change the channel.

"I could blow my stack. I'm trying to be cryptic," he said. "To tell you the truth, I don't know what's going on. They are so afraid of me and what this show represents."

Mr. Stern has a very romantic view of himself, but the fact of the matter is that the airwaves are owned by the public, and we shouldn't have to "turn it off". We own the frequencies, and we license them to you.

Rather than review The Passion of the Christ (which I haven't seen yet), I'll perform a meta-review and critique A. O. Scott's take on thase film from the NYT. Most of the reviews I've read seem to be written from a similar set of notes, and Mr. (Ms.?) Scott's review appears quite representative. Few writers have condemned the movie for anti-semitism, but for the most part they still don't really get it. Mr. Scott does seem to get it -- but he doesn't realize that he gets it.

Mr. Gibson has departed radically from the tone and spirit of earlier American movies about Jesus, which have tended to be palatable (if often extremely long) Sunday school homilies designed to soothe the audience rather than to terrify or inflame it.

Although I'm not able to read Mel Gibson's mind, I imagine Mr. Scott is right on the money. Our civilization has spent a lot of effort over the past two millenia morphing Jesus into a soothing, effeminate goody-goody, but the reality of his life and message is much more visceral.

By rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus' death and fixing our eyes on every welt and gash on his body, this film means to make literal an event that the Gospels often treat with circumspection and that tends to be thought about somewhat abstractly. Look, the movie seems to insist, when we say he died for our sins, this is what we mean.

I think this is exactly the point. Jesus' death wasn't an abstract philisophical theory, but a brutal reality, and the pivotal moment in human history.

Many reviewers, including Mr. Scott, don't understand the theology behind Jesus' crucifixion.

A viewer, particularly one who accepts the theological import of the story, is thus caught in a sadomasochistic paradox, as are the disciples for whom Jesus, in a flashback that occurs toward the end, promises to lay down his life. The ordinary human response is to wish for the carnage to stop, an impulse that seems lacking in the dissolute Roman soldiers and the self-righteous Pharisees. (More about them shortly.) But without their fathomless cruelty, the story would not reach its necessary end. To halt the execution would thwart divine providence and refuse the gift of redemption.

I can't speculate on what would have happened had someone halted Jesus' execution, but deicide is surely the most contemptable of acts. It would have been far more just and right if Jesus' life had been spared and if all of humanity were forced to stand, unredeemed, before God's perfect judgement.

Mr. Scott goes on to make a false analogy.

And Mr. Gibson, either guilelessly or ingeniously, has exploited the popular appetite for terror and gore for what he and his allies see as a higher end. The means, however, are no different from those used by virtuosos of shock cinema like Quentin Tarantino and Gaspar Noé, who subjected Ms. Bellucci to such grievous indignity in "Irréversible." Mr. Gibson is temperamentally a more stolid, less formally adventurous filmmaker, but he is no less a connoisseur of violence, and it will be amusing to see some of the same scolds who condemned Mr. Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" sing the praises of "The Passion of the Christ."

Perhaps the underlying motivation behind the violence in question should count for something when assessing its value? Is all nudity pornographic? The means may be similar, but the ends are wholly different, and generally that matters.

This next sentence blows me away.

The only psychological complexity in this tableau of goodness and villainy belongs to Pontius Pilate and his wife, Claudia, played by two very capable actors, Hristo Naumov Shopov and Claudia Gerini, who I hope will become more familiar to American audiences.

There's not enough psychological complexity in the story of God's death at the hands of his creation?

And finally:

What makes the movie so grim and ugly is Mr. Gibson's inability to think beyond the conventional logic of movie narrative. In most movies — certainly in most movies directed by or starring Mr. Gibson — violence against the innocent demands righteous vengeance in the third act, an expectation that Mr. Gibson in this case whips up and leaves unsatisfied.

On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, "The Passion of the Christ" never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson's most serious artistic failure. The Gospels, at least in some interpretations, suggest that the story ends in forgiveness. But such an ending seems beyond Mr. Gibson's imaginative capacities.

The whole point of Jesus' death is that it bought us forgiveness. It's God screaming: Look how much I love you! Look how much you're worth to me! There's no more painfully beautiful expression of love.

John 15:13
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Romans 5:8
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

I've been playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance recently, and it's reminded me of everything I love about party-building adventure games. As with all such games, FFTA is an exercise in inching your stats ever higher, but it's a bit more interactive than some other offerings. I'm sure I'll tire of it long before I finish, but it's a nice way to kill time while my PhD simulation is running in the background.