(11:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

A New Problem with The Passion

My parents are visiting, and tonight we discussed The Passion for a time -- my mom's a big fan, and I am not. Sure, it's not fair of me to pass judgment before I've seen it (a procedural issue that most Christians never follow when preemptively boycotting a movie), but I found the process of discussing the movie with her to be productive. I came up with the following new ideas through the conversation:

1. To "repeat" the gospels, it is not sufficient to attempt to create a historically accurate movie. If the gospel is true, then the life of Christ did not just happen "back then," but is in fact happening now. Any movie that purports to be a response to the gospel or a telling of the gospel is going to have to illustrate how the life of Christ is happening now (even if it uses the setting of ancient Palestine to do so), just as the gospel writers did in their own time.
   
2. The reason the gospels don't go into vivid detail about the actual process of the crucifixion is perhaps that everyone already knew all about it -- it was not an unusual thing. Jesus was far from the only person to be crucified, a punishment that had a specific and well-known meaning at the time. Any movie that spends 45 minutes fetishizing Jesus' intense suffering, however "historically accurate", is obscuring the obscene commonness of crucifixion and making it seem as though Jesus was the only person ever to have suffered such a fate.
   
3. My sister pointed out that although Gibson claims to have been trying to make a historically accurate movie, he is not especially faithful either to history or to the gospels -- for instance, Satan appears in the Garden of Gethsemane, which does not occur in any of the gospels, no matter how much sense it makes or how plausible it is in a creative retelling of the gospel, and more importantly, Jesus wasn't white. Claiming to be historically accurate when one is actually doing a creative retelling is very dangerous. (The fact that Jesus and Pilate are the only white characters in the movie is interesting -- especially given that Pilate is traditionally given a much more favorable treatment than the Jews, who apparently look Middle Eastern in the movie.)

The base of my complaint: if I were to make a Jesus movie, I would make it radically different. I know it's not fair; I know Mel Gibson has the right to do whatever kind of movie he wants; I know I haven't even seen the damn thing. But whatever. "Here I stand -- I can do no other."

(My parents and I disagree about a lot of issues, but they're remarkably open to talk about such things and always give me a fair hearing. I try my best to extend them the same courtesy, especially given that I'm still a student and can't realistically expect them to agree with me when I don't always agree with what I said three days ago -- but it's really hard when I'm obviously in the process of developing more and more correct opinions.)

| permalink | Main Page