Blood and Circuses

The jury seems to be in. The Passion is a well-mounted, beautifully shot melodrama, well-acted and deftly directed. It’s impressive and powerful enough to warrant much of the hubbub around it. And director Mel Gibson was nothing if not gutsy in laying out his own money to make a religious film in an extinct language.

But it turns out this vividly violent movie is not so much about theology or faith or any Christian message. It’s about makeup. It’s about special effects. It revels in the spectacle of cruelty and torment. The violence is an end in itself, in the same way crashing cars or exploding spacecraft are in other movies. You come to marvel at the ability of filmmakers to appall you with flailed flesh and splattered blood. Real showmanship. But the impact comes only from the violence, not the message. Watching any film character endure such abuse would be as disturbing.

It could have been Frodo Baggins.  It didn’t have to be the son of God.

All of which has raised a controversy over what this movie is really about. It seems to be pretty much a one-note song. With no backstory, the purpose for all this is largely lost. It’s like watching the trial and execution of a black man for whistling at a white woman without explaining the Jim Crow South. It’s all consequence and no cause, as if we’re only seeing the film’s third act.

It’s a skillful indulgence by the filmmakers in cinematic sadism. This isn’t a new tactic for director Mel Gibson. Watching the final sequence of Braveheart, you can almost see a dress-rehearsal for The Passion. But this film goes much further, dragging us through every agonizing step from conviction to crucifixion – beyond what is necessary to make the point, and way beyond anything found in the Bible.

Which brings us to the question, is all this violence accurate to scripture? Well, think of it as “scripture-plus.” In all four Gospels, the abuse of Jesus is summed up in about a dozen words. He was “mocked,” “spat upon,” struck in the head with a reed,” and “scourged” (whipped or severely punished.) Then came the crown of thorns. That’s it. Two sentences, max. Everything beyond that is Mel Gibson’s speculation and embellishment.

Gibson allegedly comes from a Catholic sect that emphasizes the suffering of Christ to pay for our sins. It’s a tradition that blossomed in medieval Spain and is carried on today in many Latin American sects. Visit a church altar south of the border and chances are you’ll see a Jesus dripping with blood, rather than the sanitized icon we see in the States. But even there the haemoglobin count is low. The exhausting, relentless, near-pornographic gore and cruelty in The Passion are Gibson’s vision – not the picture painted by Mark, Matthew, Luke or John.

There’s also been much gnashing of teeth over whether or not the movie is anti-Semitic. It certainly paints an ugly portrait of Jerusalem’s high priests, the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin, who are the driving force behind Christ’s execution. But those who have a problem with this aspect of the film must also have a problem with scripture. According to all four Gospels, the onus was indeed on the high priests, or at least some of them – as the film acknowledges. It was they who pressed Pilate to silence the upstart preacher. The book of Matthew goes even further, having the crowd exclaim, “His blood be on us and on our children.” It’s a line for which Jews have paid an awful price, and which was mercifully deleted from the movie’s subtitles (although it remains, strangely, in the Aramaic dialogue).

Unfortunately, zealots and bigots grasped at these straws to flog those they disliked. So, belief in blaming “the Jews” was persistent for many centuries. It’s the antique notion of collective guilt. And images in The Passion, like an androgynous Satan drifting invisibly amid the Sanhedrin (not in scripture) do make Gibson’s motives a tad suspect. It’s as if the priests were doing Satan’s work, when it was God who presumably scripted these events. Hence, those predisposed to using the film to reaffirm their bigotry can do so. But nobody else is likely to take up torches and pitchforks.

Of course, you can’t rightly make Christ’s story anti-Semitic. Jesus himself was a Semite, and a Jew. His teachings were not of an alien faith seeking to conquer Judaism. Quite the contrary. He quoted the Commandments and the Hebrew prophets of old, and claimed his own coming was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Nor can you entirely blame the Jewish priests for being outraged by this. Here was an obscure preacher in a deeply devout culture posing as the Messiah, and suggesting the current crop of religious leaders were sinners and hypocrites. If an Imam in Afghanistan made such claims under the Taliban, he would have been stoned to death in the streets. And who knows what would happen if you laid this on Pat Roberston?

But the Gospels were not authored by cool-headed historians. They were written by later evangelists with a clear agenda. Since the Vatican II Council (which Christopher Hitchens claims Gibson’s faith rejects), the Catholic Church insists you can’t blame people today for actions taken centuries ago. Secularists also regard this as immoral and a bit insane. The sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the son (except maybe in the case of George Bush). An angry Jewish lynch mob may be part of the Passover plot, but that was then.

To be fair, the film is also pretty tough on the Romans. Hollywood has never been kind to the people who established our legal traditions and introduced ideas like “The Rule of Law” and “The Rights of Man.” They’re forever cast as proto-Nazis of a sort, perpetually oppressive, barbarian and cruel. Small wonder, since the only people making movies these days are Christians and Jews, both of whom have ancient axes to grind. Even non-religious movies like Gladiator concentrate on their most corrupt leaders and brutal pastimes. It’s as if a thousand years from now the North Vietnamese became the dominant makers of movies and the only vision of Americans they portrayed was as warriors and football players. (Sounds a lot like Fox News.) The politically acceptable thing to do in that case, is to give the pagan soldiers the job of savaging Jesus.

But ruthless as they could be, the Romans were also the great civilizing force of the age. They were more tolerant of local religious beliefs than any other empire of the era. First century Rome was a roiling stew of competing religions and cults. Jews constituted about 10% of the empire. And like California in the ‘70s, self-styled Svengalis routinely popped up with a smorgasbord of teachings and followers. Just as New Age gurus fused the traditional beliefs in God with Free Love or Eastern mysticism, many first century cults threw everything from Jewish theology to Greek philosophy into the mix.

It was over this polyglot of beliefs that the Romans reigned. Their interest was not religion. It was law and order. Pay your taxes and observe the laws, and there’d be no trouble. But in The Passion, the Romans delight in torturing Jesus as if it were personal. As if this was their idea. Sure, they mocked and beat him; that was their job. But the personal contempt and the endless cruelty in the film are not illustrated in scripture.

About the only one in the movie who doesn’t come off like a barbarian is Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. There’s been much carping over the fact that he’s portrayed in the film as a waffling softy on the Jesus issue. But in the Gospels he repeatedly says, “I find no crime in this man,” and he refuses to condemn the maverick preacher even after Jesus says to his face, ”You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above…” (John 19:11). Them’s fighting words to a Roman governor. Yet, he never concluded that Jesus deserved crucifixion.

Pilate was in fact a thug. Even Emperor Tiberius (who knew what he was talking about) warned him about his brutality, and ultimately called him to account. But the Gospels make it clear that Pilate wanted nothing to do with the Jesus matter, and his instinct was to set him free. Part of the story’s point is that even a hanging judge like Pilate, who was never shy about crucifying enemies of Rome, found no guilt in Jesus. This is why, when forced to placate the mob lest he invite a riot (and hence the Emperor’s wrath), he literally “washes his hands” of the matter and lets the mob decide Christ’s fate. This is fairly rendered in the film.

Christ’s revolution was a religious one, not a political one, and therefore no threat to Rome. In fact, Jesus was an early advocate of church-state separation (which may have upset the Pharisees then as much as it does fundamentalists today). When asked if Jews should pay taxes to Rome, he famously answered, “Render therefore unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21) Meaning, yes – pay up. He never advocated the violent overthrow of Rome. In fact, he admonished the insurrectionist Barabbas about this, and claimed those who lived by the sword would die by the sword. But without the Roman sadists, there’d be no one to mete out the extended cruelty that is The Passion’s stock in trade.

All this is red meat for religious firebrands who regard themselves as persecuted truth-bearers in a secular world. And this is one of the reasons fundamentalists have flocked around the film. As with Right–to-Life activists who hold up ghastly abortion photos in public, the shock value here is “God’s own will,” if you believe it promotes the faith. Do this in the name of anything else and you’re corrupting the culture.

The rage and debate over this movie will likely continue as the film travels to other cultures, many of which will react in a way that will make our hissy-fits look civil and nuanced by comparison. Sadly, a little of Christ’s teaching, which is sorely lacking in the film, would be of use here. The one ray of philosophical light that does come through in the movie is his admonition that you should love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you. That’s a message few in this debate seem willing to practice.

Still, the power of the film is undeniable. It has the power to make Christian fundamentalists take 10-year-olds to the most sadistic movie of the year. It has the power to make liberals complain about excessive violence on screen. Most ironic of all, it has the power to send a message that even its creator didn’t intend: that Christianity is a faith born of blood and human sacrifice as much as any of its pagan predecessors. Now let’s see… a creator whose creation gets entirely out of hand and doesn’t do what he intends. Where have I heard that one before?

You know, it might make a good movie.