Monday, January 24, 2005
(10:31 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Passolini's Saint Paul
Someone needs to translate this screenplay into English -- even better, someone needs to translate it into an actual film. I just finished reading it in the French translation, and I found it to be a sensitive, insightful, and at times moving portrayal of Paul and his mission.Passolini doesn't make Paul into a likable character by any means -- such a task would be impossible -- but he makes him into a very human and finally sympathetic character, both in his private struggle with the "thorn in the flesh" and in his arrogance and in his blindness to the unexpected consequences of his mission. The last quarter of the screenplay is particularly effective in displaying the latter. The film would have cut back and forth between Paul writing his epistle to Timothy and a scene of the Bishop Timothy, decked out in full ecclesiastical regalia -- there is a gap between Timothy's practice and Paul's advice, but a disturbingly small one. There is also a dream-like sequence in which Paul meets with the established leaders of the movement, who tell him that they need to face up to the fact that they're becoming an organized institution and may have to do things that they would prefer not to do -- because, after all, they don't offer people redemption itself, only the hope of redemption.
In some ways, the film is somewhat heavy-handed, particularly in its treatment of Luke, who is basically under contract with the devil to write an account that will betray the true spirit of Paul's message. Passolini, however, follows the account in Acts almost exactly, as well as including several epistles that would have been acknowledged as spurious even in his own time (even Hebrews). Rather than having the Romans execute Paul, as the tradition has it and as it probably played out in historical fact, he has Paul released to an ambiguous form of house arrest in a New York hotel, where an anonymous assassin trails him for a while and finally shoots him just after he finishes his epistle to Timothy -- and, in a scene that Passolini wasn't sure whether he should include or not, he has Paul, the obsessed theologian and organizer, for once simply go out for a stroll, watch some kids on a merry-go-round, sit on a park bench. Were I to produce this film, I would include that scene, simply for the sake of allowing Paul an excess of humanity above and beyond his single-minded devotion to his mission.
His casual walk in the park would evince a half-consciousness of the completion of his mission -- a half-consciousness that has characterized his being-in-the-world throughout, that allows him to be at the same time a rigorous organizer and a failed politician, a fully rational and consistant theologian and a terrible judge of how his arguments are going to be received. Riots are an ever-present possibility whenever Paul so much as opens his mouth -- riots, or in the case of the intelligensia of every city (not just Athens), walk-outs.
Paul is not afraid to think an idea through to its fullest consequences, and that consitutes both his complete innocence and his complete subversion of the current order -- what Zizek would call "feminine transgression of the Law" through an excessive obedience. The recommendation to submit to the governing authorities, delivered to a wonderful crowd of hippies, drug addicts, prostitutes, and vagrants, causes a riot -- more frightful, Passolini says, than a fascist lynch mob -- is the supreme example. The governing authorities, which stand under the radical judgment of God, must be able to see that the children of the Kingdom are innocent by every standard, and so obedience to them even in the face of injustice only heaps judgment onto their heads.
Passolini's Paul is not a Beautiful Soul by any means -- he is anything but afraid to become involved in the world, much to the disgust of the self-effacing Beautiful Souls who would aspire to leadership-without-leadership. He is a subject who acts in a kind of radical disconnection from the world of utility and of natural causation -- who acts in utter self-assurance not despite setbacks but almost in complete ignorance of setbacks as such, as though toward the end of his life he lost all concept of what a setback might be. When he takes his walk through the park and then meets his death, one is left with an unsettling impression that, on the one hand, his task really is complete, but on the other hand, it is not at all certain what that task was or what it would mean for it to be complete. (Passolini's insistent drawing of parallels to Martin Luther King, Jr., even to the point of wanting Paul's assassination to be filmed in the same hotel where King was assassinated, helps to give us a way of understanding this -- and, I would argue, gives us a new way of understand King's work.)
Passolini's Paul stands finally as a testament to what it means to do something as such -- and surely it is Passolini's Paul more than the Paul of the Epistles who underpins Badiou's appropriation -- and a testament to the fact that one can always stand back and refrain from acting. One is always justified in refraining, and yet an authentic act, an authentic intervention, is also always beyond judgment, beyond assessment. The subject who acts, in the strong sense, is always innocent, and that subject is always immortal and invincible until his work is complete -- one must always say, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that "the world was not worthy of them."
